Siva and Shakti in Perfect Balance

Years back, about ten, a Buddhist priest shared his impressions of the monastery gardens. He offered that Iraivan temple is hard, granite, rigid, rectilinear, unchanging, strong--therefore masculine. And the surrounding gardens are soft, healing, pliable, nurturing--that is, feminine. He saw here the perfect balance of the two, Siva and Shakti.

One of the aspects of the Shakti side of this is that the gardens, being so alive, are constantly changing. Today we are dealing with a few of those natural changes. One team is repairing some damage made by the wild pigs in the newly planted Mondo Grass. Another is weeding Mondo on the other side. A third team is picking up trimmings around Dakshinamurti.

But the biggest team is a professional tree trimming crew that has come to remove a large banyan that fell into a pond during the historic April 11th storm that brought 14-16" of rain in less than a day. The tree was a bit aged and unhappy in the water. Once it is cleared, we can plant something special with the space.

We also give a BEFORE & AFTER slider of the temple itself.

[twenty20 img1="898215" img2="898214" offset="0.5" before="AFTER" after="BEFORE"]

Replanting mondo where the pigs dug it up two nights back.

Tandu and Jim Hamilton hand-weed the mondo, a task that will not be required once it is established.

Thank you, Jim.

The tree crew arrives with a special crane needed in order to reach out over the pond, grapple the limbs of the banyan and pull them to the shore.

It will take them a day and a half, they estimate, of hard work.

The special grapple holds a limb, and a built-in chainsaw cuts it.

Hundreds of pieces have to be cut and moved and then chipped. They are strong, careful experts.

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