Zen Shorts - 3 Year Old Style

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I am a big fan of John J Muth, and one of the children's books that he has published is called Zen Shorts. If you haven't read it, even if you don't have kids, you should. He takes 3 common zen stories and puts them into children's context that I find great.
I also believe children really can teach us a lot about being zen. So sometimes if I can't sit, it's nice to just really focus on my daughter and learn from her. So I thought I would share one of those moments with you John Muth style :-)

Naomi's Flowers
In the corner of a big backyard, surrounding a garden, a clump of flowers grew. Purple and white and yellow, they were the biggest flowers Naomi had ever seen.
Whenever she could, she would wade through this sea of purple and pick the very best, and prettiest flowers. She then would tour the yard for other flowers; big white puffy ones, and yellow daisy-like ones.
One day, however, Naomi went to pick the pretty flowers, and they were gone. She rushed to her mom in dismay 'mama! Mama! The purple flowers! They are gone!'
Her mother said that daddy had to cut them down. He had to because they would hurt the garden.
But Naomi was sad, how could anyone cut down such beautiful flowers.

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So the non-zen version of this story if you haven't figured out is that my husband delayed in mowing the backyard and near the garden a torrent of weeds grew up, threatening to choke out the cabbage that we had just planted. As you may guess the rest of the yard also, had a slew of weeds starting to grow as well and the dandelions were beginning to take over. So Shawn finally got around to mowing all this down.
But I couldn't help but share the great perspective of my daughter. To her they were not weeds at all. In fact when she came to me all upset that the flowers near the garden were gone, I couldn't figure out what she meant, I didn't recall planting any flowers.
There is that saying that one man's trash is another man's treasure. I think this applies here as well but if you have ever read the book Plant Seed, Pull Weed, sometimes it's nice to let the weeds grow, and flower. And it takes someone else, like a crazy 3 year old to notice the flowers.

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