Free Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance by Robert Crisp Page A

indulgences?” The answer would have to have been “No.”
    In other words, I had not been able to impose my own terms in the warfare I waged continuously with what could best be described as the forces of nature; and it was being made plain to me with each passing week that if this encounter was to end in unconditional surrender by one side or the other, it would probably be by me. When I raised my head from the evening table on the terrace where I was writing this I was immediately confronted by a brown and yellow hillside from which the green of oak and thorn tree emerged like scattered oases.
    In my war the earth was strictly neutral. It lay there brown and indifferent where I had eliminated the arch-enemies of thistle and weed. The yellow area was still firmly held by massed and hostile ranks in a constant state of readiness to invade my little island.
    I could only enlist the earth as an ally by bribing it with enormous quantities of water throughout the long, dry summer and the few green patches that had maintained a footing about me were sad testimony to the inadequacy of my bribes.
    Let’s see … there were nine chrysanthemumsdisplaying a toughness and resilience which I never dreamed such a lovely flower could possess; they were supported by a half dozen dilapidated and homesick zinnias, a few Hellenic shrubs which knew how to cope with these conditions, and some ubiquitous geraniums, bless them. The geraniums, the zinnias and a blue-flowering hedge provided the only blobs of colour in my garden. The lawn resembled a bomb site without even the verdant relief of weeds. There was a loquat tree, recently transplanted and showing clear signs of disapproval at the enforced change in environment and, finally, four cabbage plants. The latter were about eighteen inches high and had been like that for four months. I watered them now more as an automatic process than in expectation of further progress. My attempts at providing myself with vegetables through the summer had lived up to everybody’s expectations except my own. That meant I had been able to rescue a few salads and a couple of handfuls of this and that to be thrown in the soup. But the real spoils had gone to the hens, the sun and the tortoises.
    Ruthlessness is essential to success in war as in making a million and I just could not face going round the garden decapitating tortoises. I used to take them a couple of hundred yards down the road and hope they would not get back before the lettuce or the beetroot or the marrows ripened. They always did.
    A platoon of yellow skeletons marching over the brow of the hill, who cackled and jeered at me with every passing wind, was all that remained of my maize field.
    I might, in fact, have gotten one corncob to eat out of the beach garden. I calculated it had taken something like 150 buckets of water to produce. It had all been a simple case of not producing enough buckets of water.
    My hopes for a green future were literally canned. The self-injunction never to throw anything away had been well-rewarded a number of times, and more than twenty empty condensed milk tins plus half a dozen that used to hold tomato paste were now flourishing little nursery gardens crowding my broad window ledges, turning my living room into a fortress against the sun and the drought and the weeds.
    If there was a retreat it was into this green redoubt and it could justifiably be called a retirement to a better position. My grassless terrace was now bordered by creeping succulents and other hardy creepers which would, in due course, flow over the rockery with which I was fortifying and coercing the neutral soil. My tactical policy had been forced on me: I reinforced only success. Beyond these unlikely succulent outposts was the barren no-man’s-land conceded to the sun. The outcome of the campaign would not be known until the first rains of winter brought the earth to life. The big question was – would it come to