A Ceremony Asking Forgiveness from the Plants and Animals

This ceremony was part of a service conducted at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center on Earth Day 1990. It was coordinated and written by Wendy Johnson and Stephanie Kaza.

We have for some time wanted to come together to express our sadness and grief for the animals and plants who have died in conjunction with our efforts in organic farming and gardening at Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara. Recently we performed a memorial service for these beings at Green Gulch Farm. At the end of the ceremony we made the following dedication:

Plants and Animals in the Garden,

We welcome you—we invite you in—we ask your forgiveness and your understanding. Listen as we invoke your names, as we also listen for you:

Little sparrows, quail, robins and house finches who have died in our strawberry nets;

Young Cooper’s hawk who flew into our sweet pea trellis and broke your neck;

Numerous orange-bellied newts who died in our shears, in our irrigation pipes, by our cars and by our feet;

Slugs and snails whom we have pursued for years, feeding you to the ducks, crushing you, trapping you, picking you off and tossing you over our fences;

Gophers and moles, trapped and scorned by us, and also watched with love, admiration and awe for your one-mindedness;

Sowbugs, spitbugs, earwigs, flea beetles, woolly aphids, rose-suckers, cutworms, millipedes and other insects whom we have lured and stopped;

Snakes and mice who have been caught in our water system and killed by our mowers;

Families of mice who have died in irrigation pipes, by electricity in our pump box and by predators while nesting in our greenhouses;

Manure worms and earthworms, severed by spades, and numerous microscopic life-forms in our compost system who have been burned by sunlight;

Feral cats and raccoons whom we’ve steadily chased from the garden;

Rats whom we poisoned and trapped and drowned.

Deer, chased at dawn and at midnight, routed by dogs, by farmers, by fences and numerous barriers;

Plants: colored lettuces, young broccoli, ripe strawberries and sweet apples; all of you who have lured the animals to your sides, and all plants we have shunned: poison hemlock, pigweed, bindweed, stinging nettle, bull thistle;

We call up plants we have removed by dividing you and separating you, and by deciding you no longer grow well here;

We invoke you and thank you and continue to learn from you. We dedicate this ceremony to you. We will continue to practice with you and for you.

∞

From the Spring 1991 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 7, No. 2)

Related article: Tree Planting at Green Gulch Farm, by Wendy Johnson

Animals, Ceremony, Ecology, Forgiveness, Gardening, Grief

Stephanie Kaza, a longtime practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism, is associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, where she teaches Buddhism and ecology, ecofeminism, radical environmentalism and unlearning consumerism. She is the author of The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees (Ballantine Books, 1993) and coeditor with Kenneth Kraft of Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism (Shambhala Publications, 2000).

Wendy Johnson, author of Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate (Bantam, 2008), is a lay-ordained dharma teacher in the tradition of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and the San Francisco Zen Center. She is one of the founders of the organic farm and garden program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center and a founder and instructor of “edible schoolyard” programs. Visit www.gardeningatthedragonsgate.com. Johnson was guest editor for Inquiring Mind's Fall 2014 issue, "Hunger," and Fall 2009's "Transformation."