"A few days later, listening to the radio, I heard scientists talking about tiny microbes found in the environment that can transform hazardous waste. The microbial life which surrounds us and of which we are composed is adept at eating and breathing some of our most dangerous toxins. The geobacter microbes, metal-breathing bacteria first found by scientists in the mud of the Potomac River outside of Washington, can 'breathe' various radioactive metals, including uranium, technetium, cobalt, and plutonium. Most amazing to me, the geobacters are natural constituents of almost all soils. Normally, they would be relatively low in numbers, but by simply sprinkling soil with vinegar, a food that they like, scientists can get them to become extremely numerous. They breathe the toxins in and out and in the process change them from a very soluble to an insoluble form.
"While meditating, it had come to me that nothing can be thrown away. Now I took another step: nothing can be thrown away, but it can be transformed. We can be nourished by the garbage. We can 'eat' it or we can breathe it in and breathe it out changed.
"This picture of bacteria transforming garbage, like that of the landfill meadow healing itself, became a catalytic image for me. I imagined teams of toxin-gobbling bacteria eating and digesting the trash and turning it back into Buddha fields. What I loved most was the thought that microbes are natural constituents of most soils, and that, allowed conducive conditions, the landfill moved naturally toward life and healing. Not so different from the healing of the heart through meditation.
"I felt a sense of intrinsic possibility — that our basic nature, if approached with finesse, can recover itself. Whether we're grappling with the garbage of place or of heart, we can tap into a natural propensity to express a fundamentally wild nature — spontaneous, self-propagating, freely manifesting, intrinsically orderly, naturally coherent.
"Several months into my regime of sitting with the garbage, walking with the garbage, studying the garbage, I noticed that, without my realizing it, some of what had felt so stymied in my life had indeed changed. I had finally sorted, reshelved, and filed the remains of my book project; I was meditating every day, first at the monastery, and most recently, after I had cleared space in my office, at home; and I was once again taking exploratory walks on my own.
"Each day I continued to walk around Waterfront Park. One morning I watched the ground squirrels standing tall on their hind legs, front paws together, at attention; from their lookout rocks they called out warnings each to each. All along the shore, in brown robes with paws in prayer, they looked to me like monks from the Order of Interbeing, standing alert and still taking care of each other. I was reminded again of that potential of the world, so easily squandered, to take care of itself.
"As I walked back toward the footbridge that morning, a breeze blew in from the bay, across the tidal mudflats, past the long-legged shorebirds, rifling through the reeds and cattails, and, as I felt it, ventilating my inner landscape. After all of those months of walks around the landfill, of allowing myself to breathe with that rotten sludge of feelings in the chest, something was clearing inside me, an open breezy space where the bay wind could blow free. I felt a wide clarity. The heart can love. That's how it came to me."
