Slow Mango

the two chicken farmers

a story Ajahn Brahm tells, and he had it from his teacher, Ajahn Chah

A long time ago, two chicken farmers lived on neighbouring farms. They kept the same hours and did the same work, but they were not the same kind of farmer.

The first one was up before dawn. He took his basket down to the shed, opened the door and got to work. When he came back in for breakfast his basket was full to the brim with chicken dung — every last pellet the hens had dropped in the night, gathered up and carried home. The eggs he left lying where they were, to rot.

The second farmer walked down to the same shed with the same kind of basket, and filled it with eggs. The dung he left behind him, to rot where it lay.

So one of them came home with a stinking basket he couldn't eat, and the other came home with an omelette for his family and a few eggs left over to sell at the market.

Ajahn Brahm calls the first one a very dumb chicken farmer, and he means it kindly, because most of us are that farmer. Your partner asks how your day was. What comes out? The boss was in a mood. The phone kept cutting out. The computer crashed. Ask about the good part and you have to stop and think.

We're all taught to be fault-finders. We look back over the day, the week, the year, and we put the dung in the basket. The eggs we leave to rot.

People object at this point: but if I don't remember what went wrong, I'll only go and do it again. Ajahn Brahm's answer is that you learn far more from your successes than from your mistakes. Remember the things that went right and you want to do them again.

And remembering the good things won't give you a big head.
It gives you a big heart.

That's the whole of it. Collect the eggs. Leave the shit to rot.

the mango tree

The mango tree isn't my invention. It's Ajahn Brahm's, and he comes back to it again and again.

Life, he says, is either the mango or the shit — that's about the size of it. And the thing he wants you to hold on to is that mango trees love dog poo. So when something foul lands in your day, you don't stand over it complaining. You dig it in. Under the tree.

A season later you're eating a mango sweeter than the ones next door, and that sweetness came out of the shit. It went into the ground and became fruit. He calls the hard stretches fertilizer for your spiritual life, and says you'll end up grateful for the crises you had, because of what they quietly grew in you.

And it isn't only yours to eat. Dig it in under the mango tree and there's fruit for everyone — your friends, your family, even your favourite monk.

So that's what the tree is doing here. The things you don't carry off don't vanish. They go into the ground and they come back as something worth eating. The only question is whether you're still the one carrying them around.

Write it down, then. Put it under the tree. Let it rot down into something sweet.

with thanks to Ajahn Brahm and Ajahn Chah