A Wild Veggie Throwing Woman and Taking Care of the Ingredients of Life Like Eyeballs

Yesterday in the webinar, I encouraged the practitioners to take care of the ingredients of their lives as if they were their eyeballs. As Dogen says in his instructions for the cook, 

Having received [rice, vegetables, and so on] protect and be frugal with them, as if they were your own eyes. 

After the webinar, I went to the local supermarket and was just starting my weekly shopping in the vegetable aisle. I glanced back and saw a large 60-ish woman with gray wiry hair, a baseball cap, and a too-small Twins wind breaker. She grabbed a package of carrots and flung it from several feet away into her cart. Thunk! Next was the cauliflower. She didn’t exactly spin, jump and shoot, but pitched it into the cart nonetheless. 

“Jesus,” I muttered to myself as I turned back to exam the Italian flat-leafed parsley, “how about taking care of your veggies as if they were your eyeballs?”

And then I saw my own roughness, maybe equal to her own, pitching her in the cart in my heart of roughneck humans. So then I muttered to myself, “How about doing the practice and caring for her as if she were my eyeballs?”

Just then the veggie thrower caught up with me and stood with her hands against her hips, looking down at the lettuce with what I imagined to be disdain. I finished selecting my parsley, set it carefully in my cart and glanced up, catching her eye. “Hi,” I said in my most treating-others-as-if-they-were-your-eyeballs way.

“Ahck!” she said as she looked back down at the lettuce.

A little taste of practicing without reward, offered free and easy by a wild White Bear, MN, veggie throwing woman.