Nature's Greatest Teacher

Having to spend most of the summer indoors while my very inconvenient fractures mend has not been my idea of a glorious summer, but as with everything else that happens in my life, I am trying to find the lessons in all of this. Being under medical house arrest until I was given the okay to "do" the stairs (which, living in a 3rd floor walk-up is essential, I might add), it forced me to look for other means of fulfillment and entertainment. It gave me no excuses not to apply my butt to the chair and work on my writing. It gave me the opportunity to read some of those books I was going to get to "some day." It encouraged me to get out the crochet hook and play with some new ideas.  And especially for those first few weeks when my shoulder was in too much pain to even hold a crochet hook and I had to sit with my leg elevated, it gave me the gift of stillness. That's when I got my most important lessons on life from the trees.

When you have to sit and do absolutely nothing but rest, you can either choose to go crazy or look for a silver lining. I chose the latter. I started watching the trees. After all, they were also stuck in one place. Maybe there was something to learn here. Well, there was more than something, there was everything. Consider the following:

• Trees give of themselves with no expectation of reward. They produce beautiful blossoms only to freely let them go to allow the fruit to grow. They reached their magnificence in the Autumn only to let go of their colorful leaves to go bare for the winter. There is no whining or complaining about this. It's just what they do.
• They provide homes for birds, squirrels and whoever needs a place to stay and never discriminates who can live there and who can't. They provide shade in the sun, shelter in a storm, and clean air. The don't expect a thank you.
• They come in all shapes and sizes, some growing crooked, some tiny, some huge, some with peeling bark and some full of insect holes. Nobody judges or criticizes each other. They accept without question.
• They stand there year after year, decade after decade, in steadfast faith that as long as they have their roots firmly planted in Mother Earth, she will provide what they need to live and fulfill their purpose which is to give of themselves in selfless service to the world.

How many of us can say the same things about ourselves? Wayne Dyer is fond of quoting a Native American proverb that says, "No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves." Can we say the same?

I challenge you to take some time to sit it one spot for an extended period of time and watch the trees. Reach out your spirit to touch theirs and see what they have to tell you about how to live your purpose. They are the wisest of elders in our own backyards. Some of them have been there for over a century. If only they could speak, imagine what they could teach us.

And so it is.

My Mother's Eyes

It had to happen sooner or later. Five years ago on my 60th birthday I looked in the mirror and saw my mother looking back at me. I don't think I look exactly like my mom although I do resemble her enough that relatives who hadn't seen me in a long time would always remark how much I looked like her. I think the feature that I would zero in on the most would be her eyes. We both have big, brown, expressive eyes.

Now that I have just turned 65 I see her more and more not just on the outside but on the inside. I gaze into those eyes and I see all of her sorrows, her pain, her joys, her fears. I understand her hardships and how much strength it took her to carry on when life treated her cruelly. My mother was adopted and it was only in her last years that she voiced her wish to know her real family. Sadly we were not able to make that happen, but we have learned enough to know that how she was treated by others, especially my father's family, led to her living a life where it was better to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself because you were never good enough.  I see all of that and feel it in every blink of my eyes. The older I get, the more I understand her and myself as well.

These days when I look in the mirror  I no longer cringe or criticize what I see there. I have earned every wrinkle and every grey hair. Covering them up or having them removed does not deny their existence. I am who I am now and forever. I am proud of that and only wish my mom could have been, too.  So when I see those big brown eyes looking back at me, I say, "I love you," to the both of us. I think she would have liked that.

And so it is.

Life Lessons From The Garden: Smoothing Out The Rough Spots

I love to watch landscape architects make creative use of stones and rocks to add depth and character to a garden. For centuries the Japanese have been using stones in Zen gardens to symbolize streams and rivers while over in the English countryside cottage gardens and fields are still surrounded by stone walls that have been standing for hundreds of  years.

An interesting thing about using stones and rocks in the garden is what happens to them over time. It may not be apparent to the casual observer but to the experienced eye of a gardener the appearance of the stones eventually changes. After so many seasons of wind, rain and snow, the rough edges of the stones and rocks begin to round out, the surfaces become smooth and some even take on new color and patina.

As humans we are all exposed to the storms in our lives on a pretty regular basis. In the beginning the storms may leave us with the sharp edges of resentment, disappointment and feeling out of control, and our spirits may become grey and disillusioned, but over time we learn to pick our battles and just flow with the rest of it. Eventually our sharp edges can become soft and our spirits reflect all the colors of hope and promise in a rainbow.

The late psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once said that if there were no storms, we would never see the etchings on the mountains. The storms of our lives create our character and waters our spirit. They shape our future. It isn't always easy to let some things roll off of us without putting up a fight, but in the end our lives are so much smoother and more beautiful without all those sharp edges poking out.

What can you do today to soften some of your sharp edges?

And so it is.

Life Lessons From The Garden: What Flowers Can Teach Us About Love

Of all the lessons I have learned from gardening over the years, I think the one that has had the most profound affect on me is what the flowers have taught me about unconditional love.

A flower starts off as a seed just like almost every other species on the planet. Right away it must struggle to grow in two different directions: downward to establish roots to stand on and absorb nourishment from its environment, and upward as it works to push itself through the soil up into the sunshine. From there it continues to grow through rain, wind and sun, and all of it just so it can fulfill its purpose: to give of itself unconditionally. It gives sustenance to the insects and birds who depend on it, and it gives beauty both visually and through the senses to humanity. Its whole existence has nothing to do with whether it is more beautiful than the flower next to it, whether it gets more water and plant food than the others, or the gardener likes it better than the next flowerbed over. In fact, the gardener may find it so beautiful and pleasing that it just might have to give up its life in the garden to become a cut flower in a vase on a sunny table, thus watching its own life fade away as the sun goes down.

A flower has to be what it is and serve the purpose for which it was put here ... to grow, to give, to be who it is. It doesn't wish it were a tree or a cow, nor does it wish to live in warmer climates or closer to the beach. It just lives its life being who it is and doing what it is meant to do which is to give pleasure. If that isn't what love is all about, I don't know what it.

And so it is.

Life Lessons From The Garden: The Stillness at the Bottom of the Pond

For all of the years that I gardened on a large scale, I always wanted a small pond. I was not one that went in for those huge, fancy water features with the splashing fountains surrounded by exotic terraced plantings. No, all I wanted was a little pond with some water plants and rocks, enough to entice the neighborhood frogs and wildlife with a few fish and turtles for company. Alas, the place where I gardened was a rented home and while my landlords were perfectly okay with my digging up the grass to put in yet another flower or vegetable bed, they had a little problem with my excavating a part of the yard for a pond. So I had to be content with a few bird baths and tabletop fountains.

I have always loved ponds ever since I was a little girl living in Queens, NY. My godparents had a small fish pond in their backyard and I would sit and watch it for hours. What really interested me was not what was happening on the surface of the pond such as the antics of the fish lazily swimming about or the frogs diving in from the lily pads. No, it was the little stone figures of mermaids and deep sea divers that sat at the bottom that had my attention. I often imagined what a mystical experience it must be to sit down at the bottom of the pond in total and perfect silence. At some point an air hose that was attached to the figures would burp forth a bubble of air that would slowly rise to the surface and pop causing a ripple to begin to spread out all the way to the stone sides of the pond.

Until I discovered the bliss that comes from sitting in meditation, I, like everyone else, experienced most of my life on the surface of my understanding. Life was "out there." Once I began to mediate and become connected with the stillness and silence at the core of my being, I began to experience life in a more intentional way. From that place of stillness I "heard" not with my physical hearing, but with my heart. I became much more responsible for  the bubbles that rose to the surface in the form of my personal interactions with the rest of the world and how far reaching those ripples could be. An unkind word spoken in a moment of anger or frustration, the need to be right rather than kind, could very well ripple out and touch people I didn't even know, affecting lives in ways I could never imagine.

Meditation teacher and author Davidji tells us that before we speak we should ask ourselves three questions about what we are about to say: 1. Is it true? 2. Is it kind? 3. Is it necessary? If we cannot say yes in response to all three of those questions, perhaps that is one ripple that does not need to rise to the surface. How more beautiful our relationships would be if we only caused ripples of kindness and love in our own personal ponds? Perhaps the next time you find yourself in a discussion or disagreement with someone, you would do well to sit in stillness at the bottom of your energetic pond and ask yourself those three questions before releasing your bubble.

And so it is.

The Second Half of Life

Two years ago when I first started writing my blog, "Flower Bear's Garden: Planting the Seeds for the Second Half of Life," people asked me just what I meant by the second half of life was. When did it start? Was there a specific birthday that marked the halfway point? And what kind of seeds were we supposed to be planting anyway?

Even though life seems to be measured in chronological years, in reality, life is measured in experience. The first half of our life is our educational experience. Through both formal education and life experiences, we absorb the world around us and build on those experiences. We grow up, go to school, get jobs, get married, have the kids ... in essence, as Dr. Wayne Dyer tells us we, "fill out all the forms." Then the day comes when the kids have moved out into the world, the job is past tense, and we look at what we have learned and experienced and ask ourselves which beliefs have been true for us and which ones were someone else's ideas or experiences that we adopted as our own. Which ones no longer serve us, which ones need to be changed, and what is there left to learn that we might not already know? More importantly, what is there yet to be experienced that calls to us?'

The second half of life, then, is where we pull out the weeds that are no longer true for us, or were never true to begin with, and plant something better in its place. We plant the seeds of gratitude, love, beauty, peace and our own personal truths. We  plant the seeds of passion and excitement, of adventures yet to be taken and experiences yet to explore. This garden  that we plant ourselves and not by others, grows into an intentional life that we water and nurture on our own terms.

I would be curious to know what you are planting in your own intentional gardens, and which weeds you have pulled out. I would not be surprised if many of us are planting the same things.  Perhaps we can share our seeds with each other.

And so it is.

Taking Up The Challenge

Ever since I made the very hard decision to move from my happy little country home and garden some years ago to an apartment in town, I have been challenging myself every spring and summer to find ways to bring the joys of gardening with me even it it meant I had to totally re-educate myself about what was possible. Since I had already come to gardening late in life, pushing 50 when I picked up my first spade and packet of seeds, it would have been easy for me to just let it all go, hang a few pots of petunias around and not tax my little grey brain anymore. But when we stop challenging ourselves, we stop growing and growing is an essential part of living. Life Coach Tony Robbins tells us that we all have a need to make progress in our lives and if we don’t grow, we stagnate and die.

It’s so easy at this stage of our lives to tell ourselves that we are too old to learn anything new and, for heavens sake, why should we? Haven’t we learned enough? We made it through all of the grades in school and all of the stages of life, and it’s kick-back time, right? Wrong. It’s okay to kick-back once in a while, and in fact learning and promoting self-care is one of the most important challenges we can pick up and run with as we move forward. Real challenge keeps us alive, gives us a reason to get out of bed in the morning and adds excitement to our lives.

This summer I have taken on two challenges although one was not really a choice but was dropped in my lap. The first challenge was to find a way to grow salad fixings on my porch garden and the second was to be able to tend that little porch garden while learning how to walk again after surgery to repair a fractured leg. The garden variety challenge involved finding certain types of tomato plants that could grow inside a screened-in area. After trial and error (and lots of advice from other container gardeners online) I found one that grows cherry tomatoes galore in a hanging pot without the need to have it on the other side of the screen for pollination purposes. I can now boast that my little porch garden provides me with tomatoes grown in pots, lettuce grown in window boxes, basil, parsley, other assorted herbs and, of course, flowers.

The other challenge was a lot harder. My great grandson, Xavier, is starting to walk at almost 10 months. To watch the two of us it is amazing that humans ever learn to walk at all. One of us has no preconceptions about how to get the job done. He just plunges ahead and shakes off the inevitable tumbles when they happen. The other refuses to let a 10 month old beat her at a game she already won once before … she just needs to move past the pain and the fear and put one foot in front of the other. So I challenged myself that by the end of June I would be able to walk out into my garden room and pluck my very own tomatoes off my very own plant all by myself sans a walker or other equipment. As I write this,it is June 30 and a bowl of beautiful little red gems sits at my elbow on the table collected by yours truly with no help from anyone except a little black and gold cat that has been my bodyguard since I arrived back home from the hospital.

If you are facing a challenge, whether it is physical, emotional, financial or any other kind, pick it up and take it on. After all, we didn’t make it this far by sitting on our butts and coasting. Challenge is growth, and growth is what living is all about. And if you are lucky enough not to have any unwanted challenges at the moment, challenge yourself to learn something new, or to take something you already know in a new direction. My new challenge for next summer? Pole beans on an indoor trellis! I dare anyone to say I can’t.

And so it is.