“It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Shrub & I”

Squibs and Blurbs

by Jerry Zimmerman

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—5/24/10—Having had my front yard moderately demolished by the installation of a new sewer line, I was faced with the prospect of revamping my lawn, shrubs, and flower beds. After my first moments of angst about the whole process of planning, hard work and expense, I came to see it as a chance for change, as in “change for the better.”

If your mind is alert and you are not swept away by emotion, large or small, life will constantly offer you opportunities, chances to see the new in the old; possibilities to move from a familiar, comfortable spot that you may not have even realized was a familiar, comfortable spot.

I had always somehow held my inherited landscaping to be valuable and venerable due to its having been a part of my house for so long and for its large and healthy presence. Suddenly, half of it had been ripped out, and as I mourned the loss of these seemingly irreplaceable healthy and mature plantings, a different feeling began to creep in—I actually might be happy to be rid of them! Slowly, but most surely, these plants had taken over, surrounding my front steps in a now very threatening and Addams Family-ish way and generally looking more ominous than beautiful and welcoming.

Aha, I thought, here is my lesson: a crack in my routine life has allowed me to see something, my bushes, for God’s sake, in a completely new way. When Buddha speaks about un-attachment, I didn’t understand that he might be talking about being un-attached to my shrubs!

However, my real lesson was still to come.

With new vigor and a positive attitude, I began removing the rest of my old landscaping to prepare for the new and improved 2010 plantings. I tore up the old rubber plant bed borders; I dug out over-grown perennials; I reshaped the beds; I filled up the holes with new dirt; I dug up the big old shrubs. Wait—digging up the biggest of these old shrubs didn’t happen so easily. This guy had real roots in this little community, and I mean roots that were as big as your leg and seemed to go to Hong Kong in a direct path through the center of the earth. This was not going to be easy.

After digging out all around the base of this giant but now topless evergreen, I decided it was ripe to be bullied out of the ground by . . . me. I’m in good shape and pretty strong, but it felt like I was trying to tear an I-beam out of a concrete mooring. More digging and chopping at the bush did so little that I considered hooking up my station wagon to the stump with a chain. I considered it until the vivid image of my rear axle being ripped from my car put an abrupt and sane end to that daydream.

I must have matured with my bushes all these years—I did not continue my pushing, pulling and smashing into that reluctant stump as I would have done in my earlier years. I stopped. And I looked. And I relaxed. This situation had a familiar sense to it.

I teach the Japanese martial art of Aikido, a discipline of non-aggressive self-defense. The main principle of this art is not about fighting or defending or strength—it is about self-development. It is about you. It is not about your opponent. It is not about anything else but you. It takes a while to understand this, particularly when someone is rushing towards you to punch or grab you. You can’t change them, you can’t change their desire or purpose at that instant; the only part of this moment that you can control is your intent, your action, your relationship to what is happening.

And there I stood, sweating and gasping, my short and stocky opponent, bereft of leaves and branches, squatting there before me in all its natural and unperturbed glory. It wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t even tremble a bit, it could really care less. There was only one thing to do: stop doing something to this bush.

I began again. This time, my goal was not to uproot the shrub but to simply do an excellent job of digging a really deep hole. I found that the job of creating a big, big hole was much different than . . . fighting. It became a focused and pleasant personal task. Once the excavation was completed, my stubborn root friend no longer had the ground to stand on and easily vacated his 30-year-old home with nary a whimper.

It is disconcerting and startling to find the depth of human experience in your front flower bed, the same spot you walk past countless mornings and evenings, the same bed you weed and mulch and trim every year without so much as a drop of wonder sliding through your mind and soul.  Even though I always fall quickly back into my quotidian life of work and friends, family and pleasures, I am changed forever by my lucky face-to-face with a surly but wise bush, provocateur and teacher of the highest order.