I mean, I know we’re made from atoms that come from the soil that also feeds the trees, and food. That same soil, combined with sun and rain also causes the abundance of beauty in nature and the very oxygen we breathe.
BUT YOU KNOW HOW sometimes you just get it more deeply in your cells?
We’re overflowing even at the level of the smallest particle of us … gosh, we come from those atoms. The atoms that were originally stardust. Sometimes it just gets me.
It wasn’t until the last seven years when I started sowing and gathering the harvest of my beautiful garden, which includes flowers, plum trees, and fig trees, that I really got how relentlessly generous, bountiful and giving nature is and, therefore, since we are part of nature, we’re meant to be so.
As I chose the zinnias in my flower vase, I marveled at how prolific and resilient they are. They’re still coming up and now they’re seven feet tall. The incredible color in the Swiss chard makes me almost not want to eat it; I want to put it in with the flowers so I can admire it a little longer.
Lettuce that keeps giving and giving that I am going to have for lunch. Watching the green peppers turn into incredible red peppers. Who knew you could eat fried green tomatoes and they would taste good? Says the girl from Canada. And the roses from the beautiful rosebush that we planted by the mailbox. Adam got that rosebush for me, and it is a gift that keeps on giving that I’ve had to nurture back to health several times. It’s a beautiful metaphor for our relationship. Right now, it is prolific. So many buds. Even the gift of communicating energetically like that.
I have danced with the communication from my garden as we went through five weeks with no rain. I have talked to my fig tree after it went through a late frost last Spring and really struggled. The fruit is still not ripe, except for six figs, which I have eaten with complete reverence that the tree could even turn out six delicious figs. I have a relationship with these plants. They are literally my friends. I go outside every time I’m home and I miss them when I’m away.
That is why the prayer of thanksgiving translated into English from Iroquois speaks to my heart. We are given to in ways that are so beyond the minutiae of everyday life. We’re so busy, we forget. You don’t have to have property to have a garden. You don’t even have to own a place to have a garden. I say this because this garden gives me the most amazing gift.
The gift of presence. The gift of being in the now. The gift of remembering that I, too, am made of them, and when I go, they will be made of me as I dissolve into dust. It is a generous, generous earth that we live on, in, and with. And the reciprocity of generosity and abundance is a way of living that I am constantly and humbly honing.
The more I am present to that innate nature of my nature and of the nature of the world, the more it is clear that harmony is possible. However, paying attention to it matters. They remind me of what matters. Deeply. Maybe this is a reminder today for you.
Maybe it’s just for me to communicate the beauty so that it integrates more within me, and then I get to live my life today in that level of overflow. And in my communion with others today, perhaps, the essence of that overflow might be activated.
All I can say is that I am blessed. I am vigilant for the blessings, and then more appear.
What are you vigilant for today?
