August 2011

About Being with Plants Musings continued

Dear Friends,

I hope you are enjoying the vibrant blooming plant beings around you, and taking some time to simply appreciate and be friends with them.

We have an incredible mullein plant in our front flower bed. The top tip of this plant is curved, so it looks like a nose and it points in different directions according to no rhyme or reason that we, humans, can attribute to it, like wind or sun. It has a mind of its own and how much it is simply reveling in the attention we are giving it and how much it has other reasons to be pointing in a different direction every time we look at it, I do not know.

My vegetable garden has a feeble chicken wire fence around it that keeps out the deer (because I used very high poplar trees with branches on them for the poles). However, raccoons and porcupines can easily climb this fence and eat or trample whatever they want. Last year, I hate to confess, I resorted to putting moth balls all around the outside of the fence to keep them out. The moth balls worked, the animals did not go in, but the smell of the moth balls almost kept me out!

Meanwhile, I have been planting climbing and native roses and mints and thistles, around the outside of the fence, hoping that they will deter the animals, with scents and prickles. And when I planted Nettle in the shadiest corner within the fence, I asked it to be the guardian of that corner.

This spring, Nettle sent a root under the foot or so of grass that I had left between it and the fence and sent a plant stem up along the fence that is twice as tall as any of the nettles growing in the patch. It is standing as such a visual Guardian of that corner, that I can only appreciate that Nettle took my expressed intention for it, to heart, and responded with amazing grace.

I am working with my thoughts about plants on job sites, as well.

In one situation, where a new garden was superimposed upon another one, the grandmother roots of one of the first garden plants, my boss calls “gout weed” (a beautiful two tone leaf) keeps putting out shoots into the present day garden. On my first tour through there, my boss told me, “this plant will be here, forever, you'll just have to keep pulling it out every time you are here”.

So I am weeding out this plant and I start thinking, why would this plant that will never have a chance to reach maturity and completion of it's natural cycle want to continue to be here, forever? Shouldn't I be encouraging it to stop putting it's lifeforce into putting out these shoots and put that energy into a different place where it is wanted and appreciated? So, I have started telling it, every time I weed it, that it is free to give up trying to grow there.

I will see, over time, how it responds to my suggestions. I can imagine that, if you have been told that you are going to be there forever, for years, that it is a switch to: “oh, I am free to stop trying to grow here, now”. It may take awhile for the new idea to take root, as it were.

Knowing that plants are aware of our thoughts, especially those about them, is good incentive to be conscious of what we are thinking around them.

And then there is the idea of nature therapy, that we go into plant full places to renew our energy.

If I am unhappy and I go for a walk in a forest, I feel better after a while if I let myself be “distracted” by resonating with the plant beings. Meanwhile, what has happened to my misery? And if I do not let myself be distracted and cheered, but hold onto my dysfunctioning, then how am I affecting the plant beings around me?

Trees, that live on inner city streets must be very special beings.

I have been in several “wildlife” parks over the past few years, where the trees have felt dispirited and are struggling to deal with the human energies that they are subjected to. One plant person I was talking to about this recently said that in some of the parks he is aware of, the caretakers are creating areas of land that are off bounds to people.

On a personal level, I am realizing, that when I act to alleviate the “suffering” of another being in this web of planetary life, it is the thanks or appreciation of that being, that balances the energy I have put out, restoring my spirit, making me feel the effort was worthwhile. So, when I hug a tree for the energy boost it gives me, I consciously appreciate what the tree is doing for me. Conversely, when I clean the dead wood out of a shrub and feed it some kelp, it beams it's appreciation at me by looking vibrantly beautiful.

Consciousness, then, it would seem, is possibly an answer to keeping the energy exchanges in balance; what would prevent the tree beings from feeling depleted from a barrage of human angst is that we take the time to appreciate what they do for us.

And the circle/cycle of thought comes back around to friendship.

Being co-creative friends with the plant worlds.

I would be interested in hearing any stories you would like to share about engaging with plant consciousness.

Blessings,

Rita