“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
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In the evening, when the people are gone, the dogs have gone home, the summer sun is setting, and the hard work of planting and watering and culling is done, Mithra Kulatunga stops working. He pulls out a wooden board, sits in his camping chair, his only piece of furniture, and writes. He does not write stories or keep a familiar journal, he writes the stories of seeds and flowers and vegetables in his garden. When they were planted, how they have grown, what they are like.
Sometimes, he has helpers. Most of the time, he is alone. Solitude is a vanishing gift in our culture, we are overwhelmed by noise and data and conflict and alarm, by messages injected into our conscious by the digital IV. And that is a loss, because solitude is precious and sacred, I always want more of it.
Sunday, I walked and talked with Mithra, I asked him if he had read Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau. He said he had heard of it, but had not yet read it, which surprised me, since he could have written it. And what an irony, because it seems that Thoreau and this thoughtful young man from Sri Lanka are connected to one another, almost channeling one another.
This week, I will remedy this and send Mithra Walden and some books by Thomas Merton, two wonderful writers and thinkers who loved solitude, simplicity, independence and humility, gifts that sometimes seem to have been washed away in our greedy and angry and distracted world. Walden and Merton are two reasons I came to live in the country, away from the maddening world of cities and suburbia in which I was mired. More than anyone or anything, these two men have been my spiritual guides and inspirations.
When I moved to this beautiful place, I first spent a year on a mountaintop reading Merton’s journals, they were my companions, along with two genial dogs. I wrote a book about it, was inspired by a Merton book, it was called Running To The Mountain. My publisher hated the book, did everything but burn it, but it is one of my favorites, it endures. The experience changed my life, and sitting with Mithra, I was once again hungry to renew the joyful experience of solitude and purpose. And it always requires renewal, especially in our world, where every inch of space seems to be about money and worry.
Mithra has embraced all of this values intuitively, he is a profoundly spiritual being, he has never lost sight of values in his movement through his young life. It is perhaps easy for the young to be idealistic, but Mirtha seems to be to be for real. His journey has taken him to a place I call Mithra’s Garden, it is already a shrine and a sanctuary, just as Walden Pond is, people already come to walk there, see the flowers, see the vegetables, take in in the beautiful space. It is a powerful place, I have no doubt it will be an important place – perhaps a healing place – to many people.
As I wrote yesterday (this is the second in a series of posts about Mithra, and about Blue Star Equiculture in Palmer, Massachusetts) Mithra lives in the garden with a handful of things. He sleeps in a tent, has a canvas camping chair, a portable stove he can hold in one hand, a wooden board for a desk, a pair of sandals, a blanket and acres of flowers and vegetables, often his dinner. He has a cellphone, he leaves his laptop behind in an apartment where he sleeps when he is attending college.
He is spending the summer building a spectacular garden at Blue Star. It is cleansing to talk to Mithra, inspiring. It is hopeful. The young are coming, I think, they may save us from the deprivations we have inflicted on our world.
Mithra means, he says, to avoid the “suffering of desire,'” the idea that he has to always get more, bigger and better things. He is almost a reincarnation of Thoreau in his passion for humility and simplicity. He shows us what we do not need as well as what we do.
He is also a powerful spiritual echo of Merton, the brilliant author and Trappist Monk who craved solitude and spent much of his adult life alone in his hermitage in Kentucky, praying and writing. Both men worshiped the natural world, struggled for simplicity and independence, and saw the importance of being connected to the earth and to the animals. Merton loved his garden.
These ideas- simplicity, faith, a need for animals, humility, a love of Mother Earth, are all evident in Mithra’s Magical Garden, it is as if they grow out of the soil there along with the flowers and rows and rows of vegetables. It was, in fact, the big draft horses who plowed the field for Mithra’s Garden.
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” – Thoreau, Walden.
In the garden, Mithra says he has what he needs. Mithra is 24, he is a student at the University of Massachusetts, he is studying sustainable farming. He was drawn to the garden by the idea of the community of Blue Star Equiculture, there, he says, the horses and the people have brought him to this magical summer. At Blue Star, he says, there is no pressure, no fear, he is free to imagine and create his own garden, and it is an astonishing place.
Mithra has the focus of Thoreau and the faith of Merton. He seems to be swimming in the very opposite stream of the world around him, the stress, greed, stress, scrambling, the search for discounts and sales, gadgets and enough money to fool oneself into thinking they can be safe. That takes great courage and faith, it is very rare, it is a holy thing. I wonder how someone so young acquired so much faith and purpose. He said it began with the farm he grew up on in Sri Lanka, then the horses at Blue Star, and then being nourished by the people there.
The garden sits in a large pasture behind Blue Star farm, framed by a beautiful 400-foot pine tree where Paul Moshimer, the co-director of Blue Star, took his own life two months ago. The very ground seems to shimmer with mystical power. Two rivers connect at the edge of the pasture, there is a Peace Pole where people come to meditate and pray. The horses come by regularly, to ride, to swim, to work.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” – Thoreau, Walden.
I asked Mithra what it is he wants. He wants, he says, to return to Sri Lanka and manage the farm his father is managing. He wants to manage the farm in a sustainable way, he wants to use draft horses instead of tractors, he respects the power of the working animal. He wants the farm to be sustainable, that is, respectful of Mother Earth and with a great consciousness towards healing the world, and not harming it further.
“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” – Thoreau, Walden.
Mithra says he loves his life in the garden. He is not certain where it is all going, or when. But in the moment, it is where he wants to be. He is a Buddhist, he believes in living in the moment. He notices that many of the Americans he knows do not.
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” – Thomas Merton.
Mithra has worked in several jobs in the United States, his family is not wealthy. He has not liked any of them, they are pressured and tense and unfulfilling. He loves this job. In his country, as in this country, farmers are not always held in high regard. Their work is often considered menial, he says, less than glamorous, less important than the work of engineers, doctors, lawyers. He does not believe that is so. Farming, treating the land well, growing beautiful things from the soil is beautiful and sacred work. He is very happy to be doing it, he hopes to do it for the rest of his life.
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.” – Thoreau, Walden.
Mithra’s life is grounded in spirituality. Every morning, he goes to the Peace Pole by the river, a sacred spot at Blue Star, he sits and thinks there, he savors his solitude, his ability to think, to ground himself. No e-mails, no text messages, no news or weather alerts, no cable news. He is free to think, to organize his life and his values, to adhere to them. He often visits his friend Chip, who brought him to Blue Star, who has encouraged him. He feels enveloped in the community of the farm, he is, he says, supported and loved and encouraged. It makes all of the difference he says.
And compassion is perhaps a healthy virus, a new and powerful meme. As a farm manager – he is studying sustainable farming at UMass – he hopes to treat the workers on his farm the way he has been treated as Blue Star. He hopes to bring the Blue Star idea out into the world.
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
— Thomas Merton