a digressive introduction to the lojong ( བློ་སྦྱོང་) blog series

This year I started working as a landscaper, which has been something of a departure from my earlier career in publishing and academia. A year ago I took a twelve-month leave of absence from uni for a few reasons: studying on campus during covid was either a nightmare or impossible; it was always part of the plan for me to take on more of the bread-winner role so Nikki could study permaculture; working as a professional student and freelance editor was just no longer suitable for me, who has been looking for more direct ways to influence change since my publishing career began to seem like an abortive idea in my late twenties (I’m now in my late thirties). Ten years later I can now finally accept that publishing was a wild chapter of my life, which is over for now. This job … um, I mean … this blog is a hobby and an exercise in self-reflection.

Beginning work as a landscaper is also not a departure, because publishing is the path that lead me to landscaping, as landscaping is a path to what I have recently conceived of as ecoscaping. I will be doing all I can to bring the ecological awareness of permaculture to the landscaping work I’m doing. I am very fortunate to have been lead to a business run by a couple of young blokes who understand the value of permaculture. It feels a bit self-evident to say that one career path leads to another, but who ever heard of a book editor becoming a landscaper?, and sometimes it helps to be explicit about accepting that life paths are never linear.

We’ve all heard the archetypal story of the working-class kid who pulled themself up by the bootstraps and made an artistic life out of the suburbs. I did it myself. I was raised working class in the suburbs, escaped from there to middle-class creative work in the cities, and am now escaping back into the suburban working-class, which I always wanted and felt I needed to avoid. It was a kind of rebellion against the culture of my parents: I didn’t want to squander my life in what I thought was menial labour. By my early twenties I was convinced that I would spend the rest of my life in publishing, so was surprised (to say the least), when I started feeling disillusioned about that path as soon as my late twenties. Even then I started to realise I needed to be doing work that would have a more direct impact on the social and environmental issues I had started to learn about through my work in publishing. It took me ten years mixing travel with vagrancy, freelancing with study (creative writing and permaculture, at different times), and spiritual teachings with meditation/yoga to stumble upon the idea that ecoscaping is actually a suprising blend of all these, in the weird way I have managed to interpret the trade of landscaping. It wouldn’t be me doing the trade if I didn’t manage to weird it somehow.

Reflecting on this I realised that I needed to go down the urban creative-intellectual path to get a few things out of my system before I could confidently and happily move back to the suburban working-class path, doing work that combines physical, intellectual and creative labour in one outdoor package. I mean, I needed to pick up some values and principles that I could bring to working-class culture, so that I would feel my work is meaningful. If I had gone into working-class culture as an NDT technichian (as nearly happened before I landed my first opportunities in publishing) without the “training” of my urbane stage, I might not have had the confidence to make sure my working-class efforts were contributing good to the world. Nothing is linear, really. If it was, I would never have become a book editor in the first place, who is now becoming a pre-apprentice ecoscaper with a business that values the permaculture principles I may not have enountered or acquired through the tail-end of the publishing path.

But this has been a digression: this point about the path; not the path itself. May all the digressions be embraced.

Now that I am working as a landscaper with a business that values the principles I bring to the landscape of the industry, I can settle in to a creative, spiritual and intellectual project that I have been contemplating for sometime. I have the degree of stability and security and lifestyle structure I need to embark on the project and practice of reflecting each week on one of the 59 slogans of lojong (བློ་སྦྱོང་) mind-training.

The first slogan, being made up of four points under the heading, “First, train in the preliminaries”, reminds me of a teaching I was interested to learn already through Tibetan Buddhism, which is that human rebirth is fortunate and must not be squandered by wanton ignorance. I’ll reflect on that this week and see how I go at posting something vaguely weekly about each slogan. [Here’s a link.]