There are two famous characters in American cinematic history who are able to defy the so-called "laws" of gravity, as long as they don't worry about the position they are in, of being there, suspended in space, with no safety net.
The Road Runner is one, of course, of cartoon fame. He constantly leads Wile E. Coyote, who is always trying to catch him, over the edges of huge precipices, or into giant train tunnels carved through mountainsides.
On the mountain roads, the coyote, who always worries just a little too late about his position in life, sees that he has chased the roadrunner to the point that he is momentarily suspended in space, panics, and then immediately crashes to the earth, hundreds of meters away, usually ending up as flat as a pancake (through cartoon magic, I mean that quite literally!).
In the train tunnels, Wile E. Coyote chases the roadrunner in, only to find, not a great meal of roadrunner gratin, but instead, an oncoming train, leaving him even flatter than a pancake.
The Road Runner, who never worries about his position, watches the coyote approaching a disastrous end for a second or two, then races to safety without a care in the world.
I never get tired of watching these two go at it...Wile E. Coyote has got a lot of personal tools - he's persistent, he's quite creative in coming up with an endless variety of foolproof schemes to catch the Roadrunner, he's quick, he's strong, he's almost there...but the Roadrunner, he is a master of living in the moment, of being there...he uses his body as a tool to attain his ends, without regard to gravity, trains, or foxes...
And someone who is almost there just can't match up with someone who is truly and fully there, although together, master and pupil, they can produce cartoon magic for us onlookers!
The other character who defies gravity in the movies is Chance the Gardener from the 1979 movie "Being There," starring Peter Sellers. Chance lives a simple and monastic existence as the lifetime live-in gardener for the wealthy "Old Man" who is his employer, never leaving the grounds of the estate where he passes the days by attending to the landscape.
Chance's only entertainment is the small television in his room ("I like to watch" is one of his memorable sayings), and he has adapted the forms of TV advertising slogans to his life's work of caring for his neatly landscaped world. Chance speaks and thinks in gardening metaphors that are part advertising, part growing advice. They are brief, a bit cryptic, and easily understood as profound, such as "Spring, summer, autumn, winter...then spring again.".
When circumstances conspire to bring Chance out of his enclosed world into the society outside, he is mistakenly renamed Chauncey Gardener, because he wears the expensively styled clothes of his employer, and doesn't look like he could possibly be just a gardener. Chauncey's brand of sloganized thinking is so popular among the wealthy and influential friends of the "Old Man" that he quickly becomes an unofficial advisor to the President of the United States.
Except...it's not just the simple slogans of a recluse...Chance, just like the Roadrunner, truly lives in the now that he has created for himself, and at the end of the movie, he nonchalantly walks out onto the surface of a lake, bends over, and sticks his umbrella down into it. He is suspended there, walking on the water's surface, with no safety net, and no expectation that he will fall in.
All of this came to mind after I finished gardening the other day. In the wet and fertile environment of New Zealand, everything grows...and grows...and grows, weeds, flowers, and grass alike. And since I am here to tend to the property on a part time basis only, there is always much to do.
And I do almost all of it by hand, sort of like "slow-cooking" as applied to landscaping. The power tools sit in the garden shed for the most part, serving only as colorful homes for the spiders and other insects. I enjoy quietly being there with my tasks of the day, focusing only on what I'm doing at that moment, without the sounds and smells of my gas-powered mower and weed trimmer.
I know that many people love to garden because it gives them time alone to think over whatever is bothering them at that moment...it might be a fight they just had with their partner, or a health issue they are facing, or the troubled state of their finances...
But I just garden when I garden, nothing more. I try to be as mindful of my actions as I can be, and as the hours go by, I usually become more aware of the plants and weeds I'm pruning and cultivating, rather than being off in my mind somewhere.
I can tell when I get tired...I begin to think of how I can do a task easier, instead of how I can do it more mindfully.
I know then that it's time to go inside, and to call it a day.
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