Every Year a Tomato Year

Yunmen said, “I’m not asking you about before the full moon. Come and say a word or two about after the full moon.” And he himself replied, “Every day is a good day.”

—The Blue Cliff Record, Case 6

There is something about the Way that is profoundly playful. What if the high holiest truth in Buddhism is not what we were expecting? What if with all the time, treasure, and sacrifice we put into our practice, we find the unsurpassed Dharma fully realized in a single tomato? In a single tomato day?

For me, every year is a tomato year, and in late summer, every day a tomato day. 

For decades, I have planted tomato seeds in the late winter, guarded them as they started, watered them in summer, and harvested, blanched, roasted, canned or froze them in August and September. Through the late summer there is but one item on my breakfast menu: thin-sliced tomato and mayo on toast.

Every year may be a good year, but not always an easy one. One year, the snails mowed down my seedlings in the greenhouse like so much new lawn. Another, I accidentally sprayed weed killer on my plants using a can market “organic fertilizer.” But this year, the Brandywines and Romas are amazing.  

Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to Tomatoes” begins:

The street
filled with tomatoes
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like a tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets …

There is a koan that asks, “Why can’t clear-eyed people sever the red thread?” Why can’t gardeners stop the juice of countless tomatoes from running through the streets? The answer is kind of strange, rich, and deeply satisfying: Because every day is a good day.

Art: Cover of “Happy Veggies” by Mayumi Oda, the original goddess.
See www.mayumioda.net