Zen and the Transcendent Art Of Mowing Grass :: Example Personal Narratives

Zen and the prodigious Art Of Mowing Grass   As a y push throughh, I hated to pull down so much that one day I left our push-mower in the yard to rust and became an expatriated Texas writer. My first story was about an alien creation who, in the end, turned out to be a lawnmower.   By the season I came home again, I had spent so much quantify in the East that my Texas friends expected me to move into a highrise in business district Dallas. But instead we settled sixteen miles to the south, in Cedar Hill. We affect everyone by buying a place with an eight-acre yard.   It was during the summer, and I had to start mowing immediately. You vindicatory stay inside where its cool, I told Norma, who is afraid of grass. Ill take care of the yard. As I spoke, I was gazing out at more grass and widows weeds than Id ever seen in my life, except at a cemetery.   Now whenever anybody from Dallas comes out to see our spread for the first time, they remark on the seclusion, the spaciousness, the scenic beauty. wherefore they ask uneasily, Do you MOW all this? People dont like it when I say yes. They dont understand it. Old friends say Ive changed, implying for the worst.   But there is a difference between what I do today and the mowing of my youth. Mowing a niggling patch of front yard is typical outdoor city organise boring, undistinguished, pitiable, drone-like activity. But getting astride a John Deere tractor and spending twenty dollar bill mins in two days tackling tough thistles, high Johnson grass, giant vertebral column weeds, and creeper so tough it copulates with barbed wire is the kind of piercing activity that, if you survive it, eventually transcends itself. Like Zen or long-distance call running, it becomes a path to wisdom.   Ive been at it three years now, and its no calamity that I dont write as I used to. All I really want to write about is mowing-and then for merely an hour or so at a time between self-colored d ays on my tractor. The fact is, mowing and writing fill the same needs, only mowing does it better.   Mowing eight acres every week would drive some kinds of spate mad, but it has served to make me feel in harmony with the flux of the emit earth as it hurtles through time.