Sitting in your garden is a feat to
be worked at with unflagging
determination and single-mindedness - for what gardener worth
his salt sits down. I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.
- Mirabel Osler
Don't go outside your house to see
flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
- Robert Bly, The Kabir Book
Life is a child playing around your feet,
a tool you hold firmly in your grip,
a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.
- Jean Anouilh
Have you ever noticed how few sitting
places you find in private gardens?
How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True
gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop ...
To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every
felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.
- Mirabel Osler
"Rocks pray to," said
Grandad. "Pebbles and boulders
and old weathered hills. They are still and silent, and
those are two important ways to pray."
- Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of
the Earth.
The green metal chair is an indispensable
piece of equipment.
As Farmer Bagley said, "How can you grow anything without
a chair? How else are you going to see what's going on.?"
- William Longgood
Watermelons and Zen students
grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting
till they ripen and grow
all juicy inside, but
when you knock them on the head
to see if they're ready -
sound's like nothing's going on.
- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies
You are sitting on the earth and you
realize that
this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth.
You are there - fully, personally, genuinely.
- Chogyam Trungpa
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
- T.S. Eliot
She went, however, and they sauntered
about together many a half hour in
Mr. Grant's shrubbery, the weather being unusually mild for the time of year,
and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches now comparatively
unsheltered, remaining there perhaps till, in the midst of some tender ejaculation
of Fanny's on the sweets of so protracted an autumn, they were forced by the
sudden swell of a cold gust shaking down the last few yellow leaves about
them, to jump up and walk for warmth.
- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814
Spend the afternoon. You can't
take it with you.
- Annie Dillard
You do not need to leave your
room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
- Franz Kafka
To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure
is the most perfect refreshment.
- Jane Austen
I have discovered that all human evil
comes from this,
man's being unable to sit still in a room.
- Blaise Pascal
Yet it is in this loneliness that the
deepest activities begin.
It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that
is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all
desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
- Thomas Merton
These forms are not the means of
obtaining the right state of mind.
To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind.
There is no need to obtain some special state of mind.
- Shunryu Suzuki
You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you
to be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
- Frantz Kafka
Solitude gives birth to the original in us,
to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry.
But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
- Thomas Mann
For the time being, well past noon, God,
I ask that you above all leave me
alone, that I might just sit here in
the leaf shade, beside this wall with its
swallow-thrown shadows and the easy,
unmended thoughts time affords
me: these solid forms of pots, flush
with zinnias, and the sun patch fading
where the grass snake glides
unknotted.
a hallow tree
the beginning
of dusk
- Michael McClintock, Afternoon Garden
Where does my fist go when I open my
hand,
Where does my lap go when I stand up?
- Alan Watts
As you sit on the hillside, or lie
prone under the trees of the forest,
or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream,
the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
- Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping
Sitting is the gateway of truth to
total liberation.
- Dogen
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the
world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware
I sit content.
One world is aware, and by
the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own
today or in ten thousand
or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take
it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, I Celebrate Myself, Line
413
No thought, no action, no movement,
total stillness: only thus can
one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and
unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth.
- Lao Tsu
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or
frightened
but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own
private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
He lacks much who has no aptitude for
idleness.
- Louise Beebe Wilder
A bit stiff and sore
we sip water in the shade;
our day's gardening done,
admiring what we've made.
- Mike Garofalo, Cuttings -
Haiku and Short Poems
A garden is a private world or it is
nothing.
- Eleanor Perenyi
As evening approached, I came down
from the heights
of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle
in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the
waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my
senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would
plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often
stole upon me unawares.
- Jean Jacques Rosseau
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and
have it all to myself,
than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
- Henry David Thoreau
The mind can only stand what the butt can endure.
Silence - Quotes for Gardeners
To the mind that is still, the whole
universe surrenders.
- Lao Tzu
In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard seat
And birds and flowers once more to greet ...
- William Wordsworth
This magnificent butterfly finds a
little heap of dirt and sits still on it;
but man will never on his heap of mud keep still…
- Joseph Conrad
For six years you shall sow your land
and gather in its yield;
but in the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that
the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild
beasts may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and
with your olive orchard.
- Bible, Exodus 23.10-11
I have never practiced sitting
cross-legged nor do I meditate.
My work is what I do and always involves writing materials,
chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises
for my back and I water the plants, of which
I have about two hundred.
- John Cage
To tell you the truth, my tenants have a
notion that I am atheistically inclined, by putting
up heathen statues and writing on them certain words in an unknown language.
They
immediately suspected me for a papist, and my statues had been demolished, my
woods burnt and my throat cut had not I suddenly placed a seat under a holly bush
with this plain inscription, "Sit Down and Welcome." I have assured
them that all the
Latin mottoes are to this purpose, and that in places where they cannot sit down, I
have desired them in the old Norman dialect to go to the lodge, and drink whiskey.
- Lord John Orrey (1707-1762), Letters
Be a spot on the ground where nothing
is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, from the Absolute.
- Rumi
Surely ruminating and lolling,
squandering slivers of time
as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place
on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality,
are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why
shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens,
why not in our own.
- Mirabel Osler, The Garden Bench
What a thing it is to sit absolutely
alone, in the forest, at night,
cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes
by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses
everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going
to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as
it talks I am going to listen.
-Thomas Merton
Come into my garden,
Relax in a chair;
Don't let your heart harden,
Let wind touch your hair.
- Come Sit
in My Garden
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips, Maxims and Observations by Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes, Arranged by 105 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Sitting
Selected Readings
The Garden Bench. By Mirabel Osler. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1991.
The Sanctuary Garden: Creating a Place of Refuge in Your Yard or Garden.
By Christopher Forrest McDowell and Tricia Clark-McDowell. Line
illustrations by Tricia Clark-McDowell. Watercolors by Hanna Yoshimura. New
York, Simon and Schuster, A Fireside Book, 1998. ISBN: 0-684-84637-3.
$14.00. 188 pages, suggested readings. A beautiful, inspirational, and
delightful book!
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Sitting - Quotes for Gardeners, Version 3.3.8.
First Distributed on the Internet in November, 1999.