John Chapman by Mary Oliver

He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.

Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845) was alive when Thoreau was alive, though he was much older, and died when Thoreau was on Walden Pond. Leominster MA is 24 miles from Concord, where Chapman was born.

I think of John Chapman as an American Bodhisattva, the way Hotai, the fat laughing Buddha, became a Buddha, though he was perhaps a folk hero before Buddhism came to China. The way Kwan Yin evolved from Avalokita, from Green Tara. 

Supposedly he noticed insects were killing themselves in his fire, so he put it out. That seems like a Bodhisattva move. He planted a lot of trees, and I'm sure many of those trees really sustained the world for many years. He was into planting apple trees for cider, there was an element of intoxication to his work. Maybe divine madness of a sort. He was an American Dionysus.

He planted nurseries of trees, he didn't just plant seeds and keep wandering, he would fence off and tend to his nurseries. 

He was also a preacher of Swedenborgian faith, he would preach to avoid extravagance. Even though he had some money to buy land, he wore rough clothes and walked barefoot, even in the snow.To me one of the coolest things about Buddhism is the middle way. You don't have to go nuts in either direction on the extravagance to asceticism continuum. And the practice of meditation helps you see the power of minimalism and asceticism, it doesn't just prescribe it or foist it on you, you can evolve towards it. 

I find it so fascinating that Swedenborg (1688-1772) was so popular in early America and yet you rarely hear of him outside that context. Swedenborg was an inventor and scientist until he was 53, when he switched to spirituality and wrote 18 books.

Johnny Appleseed heard a horse was about to be put down so he bought it, and put it on some of his land. He was also single. Supposedly he was a vegetarian at times during his life.