tend to your garden

and make a daisy chain

The light is shifting from an ever climbing sun, and the promise of warmth closes near. With it comes small awakenings, day by day; we know the bitter cold is mostly past. It might still sneak in with a snow shower or two, but the preponderance of the season is behind us and we make our way onto the spongy moss that covers the stones.

It’s here that we start again, in the true beginning of the year. We’ve been shaken about, unable to make sense of the goings-on in this stress-trapped planet, and I for one wonder what wisdom I’m to glean from incarnating in such an anxious time. Am I to realize my own anxieties are insignificant when we look at the world and all of this movement? But it could be something else. Maybe I’m to come forward and just do my work.

Just do my work.

I know better than thinking I can create change on a large scale. But I can in small ways, building on goodness, connecting with like minded people, creating a daisy chain of hope and truth by which we can lead, guide and follow when we need to. The news is upsetting and is omni-present, not wanting to be ignored. Paying too close attention to it renders me paralysed and I am no good to anyone. There has to be some kind of balanced of staying informed and staying true to what I need to do to be happy and creative.

Today is like any other and like no other. Large events, catastrophes, disasters and more take place in the backdrop of individual lives and moments. Those individual moments are what make our lives unique. We can care with largess about the world while at the same time taking care of ourselves.

Tending to our gardens.

We gain nothing by ignoring ourselves in the light of pursuing all that is wrong. Sitting on the sofa, unable to negotiate the day because of all the awfulness that’s happening helps no one. We should do something. We should do one good thing. One good thing is better than no good things, and when we manage to do more we help other people to do them too.

A daisy chain of hope.

There is nothing easy about now. But easy is something this world has never known. As long as duality and dichotomy exist, there will always be a shadow from the light. We’re here to experience both, and to seek out the lessons brought to our garden path.

My east German mother-in-law recounted to me the weeks spent in underground bunkers while the Allied Forces bombed everything above ground towards the end of World War 2. The women desperately wanted the Americans to come but were terrified to be killed by them first. They sewed together and sang. It was their form of the daisy chain, the one that helped them survive. They learned what we need to learn now: because duality and dichotomy are an indisputable part of the human experience, foreboding times are surely not forever.

And in the meantime, live, and live well. Spring will be blooming soon just for you.

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