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

Zen and the Transcendent Art Of Mowing Grass   As a youth, I hated to mow so much that adept day I left our push-mower in the yard to rust and became an expatriated Texas writer. My first story was about an alien being who, in the end, turned out to be a lawnmower.   By the time I came home again, I had spent so much time in the East that my Texas friends expected me to move into a highrise in downtown Dallas. But instead we settled sixteen miles to the south, in Cedar Hill. We surprised everyone by buying a place with an eight-acre yard.   It was during the summer, and I had to extend mowing immediately. You just 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 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. Then t hey look at 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 betwixt what I do today and the mowing of my youth. Mowing a little patch of front yard is typical outdoor city work boring, undistinguished, pitiable, drone-like activity. But getting astride a John Deere tractor and spending twenty hours in two days tackling tough thistles, high Johnson grass, giant sticker weeds, and creeper so tough it copulates with bristled wire is the kind of intense activity that, if you survive it, eventually transcends itself. Like Zen or long-distance running, it becomes a path to wisdom.   Ive been at it three long time now, and its no accident that I dont write as I used to. All I really want to write about is mowing-and then for exclusively an hour or so at a time between whole days on my tractor. The fact is, mowing and writing fill the same needs, whole mowing does it better.   Mowing eight acres every week would drive some kinds of people mad, but it has served to make me feel in harmony with the flux of the heaving undercoat as it hurtles through time.