Product Description

Gardens have often been used as metaphors for spiritual nurturing and growth. Zen rock gardens, monastery rose gardens, even your grandmother's vegetable garden all have been described as places of refuge and reflection. Drawing on her experience working at Seattle's premier gardening center, Zen teacher Geri Larkin shows how the act of gardening can help you uncover your inner creativity, enthusiasm, vigilance, and joy. As your garden grows, so will your spirit.

Larkin takes you through the steps of planning, planting, nurturing, and maintaining a garden while offering funny stories and inspiring lessons on what plants can teach us about our lives. As soothing as a bowl of homemade vegetable soup, Plant Seed, Pull Weed will entertain, charm, and inspire you to get your hands dirty and dig deep to cultivate your inner self.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41893 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Released on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When Larkin was a college student, she took a job as a gardener—something she says she knew absolutely nothing about. Now more plant savvy, the former management consultant–turned–Buddhist priest and author (The Chocolate Cake Sutra) uses gardening and Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva to mine themes for her text. Her points are simple: see clearly, become more intentional, tame your mind, give generously and live with a wide-open heart. While advocating passion and enthusiasm, Larkin has learned the hard way that the best gardeners are patient. When we slow down, she writes, then chaos becomes beauty, lethargy energy, insolvable problems solvable. Her spare but pithy prose, common sense and laugh-out-loud humor emphasize her points. Other lessons also resonate: Learn to lose. Let go of mistakes. Forgive. Be kind. And don't worry, for anxiety will block your joy. Larkin is at her best when she shares personal experiences and insights, rather than stories about others, and the few recipes seem random. Although Larkin's book is clearly aimed at Buddhists, at its heart is a lesson about staying awake and paying attention to life, which is good advice for readers of any religious stripe. Readers will find Larkin's central promise—We can be happy. Right here. Right now—difficult to resist. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
With spare but pithy prose, common sense and laugh-out-loud humor, readers will find Larkin’s central promise—"We can be happy. Right here. Right now"—difficult to resist. -- Publishers Weekly

Review
What a joy to find spiritual writing so deeply rooted in the life of the earth. If the Buddha were alive today, Geri Larkin would be his gardener. (Clark Strand, author of Meditation Without Gurus: A Guide to the Heart of Practice )

With spare but pithy prose, common sense and laugh-out-loud humor, readers will find Larkin's central promise-"We can be happy. Right here. Right now"-difficult to resist. (Publishers Weekly )

Life as gardening is hardly an original metaphor...but Larkin breathes fresh life into it with anecdotes, insights, and enjoyable prose. Her focus on present-moment awareness and being 'as wise and compassionate as we can be, right where we are' will resonate with all readers. (Shambhala Sun )

...you'll not only grow amazing vegetables...you'll gain some Buddhist insight along the way. (Eugene Weekly )

Plant Seed, Pull Weed should find a receptive audience in this part of the world [the Pacific Northwest], where there are garden centers galore and any number of people trying to live a calmer, more centered life. (The Oregonian )

Larkin takes readers into her vegetable and flower garden to teach them a few lessons about what our minds--and spirits--need to thrive. (Body & Soul )

Both edifying and entertaining. (Spirituality & Practice )

Customer Reviews

A Book About Pulling Weeds in Your Yard -- and in Your Spiritual Approach to a Better Life
Geri Larkin's life has taken her from the heights of American business to the simplicity of Buddhist practice. She began her career as a jet-setting business consultant -- and is ending it as a sort of free-lance teacher and landscape consultant living in a tiny home in the Pacific Northwest.

In fact, in this new book she writes that when she volunteers at an emergency food bank -- it's impossible to tell her and the other folks running the program from the clients in need of the emergency food.

It's a wonderful journey, which Geri has laid out for readers in a series of books that are half spiritual memoir and half Zen advice about everything from personal relations to -- in this new book -- cooking up the dandelions you've pulled from your front yard.

Around the time her previous book, "The Chocolate Cake Sutra," was published, I invited a group of high school students to spend time interviewing Geri for a documentary film on prayer and meditation. Geri was heading back to southeast Michigan for a few days from her new home in the Pacific Northwest, and I told the students that the cost of a seat with Geri was reading her book.

If you know anything about the busy lives of teenagers, the idea of reading a book on Buddhism sounds like an impossible challenge. But, on the day of the interview, an eager little crowd of students pulled couches up around Geri's own easy chair. They pulled out these beautifully well-thumbed copies of her book -- their pages sprouting bookmarks, sticky notes and slips of paper with questions scribbled to ask Geri.

That's the best way I can convey the excitement of her spiritual voice. It can hook and hold a busy teenager -- or a busy middle-aged writer like myself.

These are books not to be missed, because they leave you with a hopeful smile on your face -- and a fistful of good ideas to make sure that smile is shared with someone else.

They're great for small groups -- easy reading, but deep provocative wisdom in each chapter.

Greening Up
What I really like about this book is how the author takes the reader right down into the garden of her own life where we are present as she nurtures her own seeds of insight and pulls the weeds of distraction. Watching, together with Larkin, I see just where and how to attend to and cultivate my own garden of life. Very useful!

A lesson that applies to all life's challenges
I've loved Geri Larkin's books since my first read and each one gets better and better. Geri shares her new life out west, and as usual, she shares her journeys, friends, pets, and posies. She gets cranky about a cold day and I love that even she takes a little while to "get it" when lessons pop up in her every day life. The title and the book lovingly suggest that we need to pay attention to our lives -- "plant seeds" whether they are ideas or relationships; and "pull weeds". . . we know who and what they are. It's as simple and as difficult as that. The best is the simple lesson on enthusiasm. Read it in a coffee shop and enjoy the looks you get as you laugh and cry out loud. Great to hear you are doing well, Geri! Waiting for your next book, with enthusiasm.