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The Story of Garbage Becoming Flowers
A flower vase offered on the Buddha’s altar contains both flowers and “garbage”—this is a metaphor for the capacity to transform: what we consider to be garbage, if we know the way, can be transformed into flowers. Some concrete examples of the time it takes for physical garbage to decompose and transform:
- dry leaves, banana peels… need only a few months to become soil and nourish flowers
- disposable diapers require at least 200 years to decompose enough to become soil
- nuclear waste takes tens of thousands of years to become harmless “flowers”—each nuclear reactor produces about 3 cubic meters of toxic waste per year
In daily life, whenever we shop or use something, we need mindfulness to recognize garbage and limit the creation of waste that is difficult to transform (such as plastic bags), while also managing and transforming psychological garbage—fear, sorrow, anxiety—so as not to let afflictions “pollute” the environment around us. At Plum Village, people use bamboo baskets and cloth bags instead of plastic bags, and practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings so as not to worship absolute doctrines and to reduce the “poisonous garbage” from the mistakes and fanaticism of the last century.
To step into the 21st century with love and understanding, we need to together “bury” the garbage of the 20th century—war, extremism, hatred, cowardice—in a “century’s grave,” so that the garbage may decompose and become fertilizer for the flowers of love to bloom on the soft meadows of the future, as illustrated in the song “Century’s Grave” by Pham Duy.
