All Consciousness Is Accessible

We often think here that somehow human consciousness is itself a unique quantity. We speak about humans as unique in the world, that special species that has risen up to be “above” all other life forms. I am here to tell you that experience has shown me that we don’t live in a world where the physical universe has offered up unique differences in consciousness because of a lucky roll of the dice or an evolutionary effect that has managed to somehow provided more goods to one species over another. While it is true on the surface that different life forms show different capacities physically, the root of what drives all of this is not different. I have seen instead that everything has consciousness and that at least right now in our technological development, consciousness is ideal for exploring the field of consciousness that exists in other life forms. I will add that even matter itself, the very atoms, are composed of units of consciousness that are part of the divine drama of consciousness turning itself into matter (which I will touch on later).

So far, I have never experienced a life form through remote viewing or conscious probing or scanning where that consciousness was fundamentally different from my own. There were differences in how the energy of consciousness might be used in small ways, but never, not even once, in larger more significant over-arching ways. Since I am always looking for evidence for my many experiments into the realm of the numinous, into studying consciousness, I have found that I have gotten some tantalizing clues that seem to show me that consciousness really isn’t that different between us and, say, plants. It has struck me how similarly plants feel, how vividly animals feel emotion and express themselves in not too different ways than we do. While the differences may seem broad, if you go to the root of every consciousness be it atom or cell or species, there is the very same sense of feeling-based awareness. In fact, I suspect that we need this feeling-based awareness in order to properly interact with the matrix of matter that is itself consciousness that has transformed itself cleverly into what we call matter.

I have been reading the human energy field since I was 18 years old. It has taught me that our thoughts and feelings are composed of energy, just like physical matter is. As a result, what we normally think of as nonphysical consciousness has a basis in physics, the study of the physical world. If thoughts and feelings are energy, which they certainly are (even if you go by the purely mechanistic view of thoughts being electrical activity in the brain) then it begins to make sense that we can study this phenomenon (which of course we do through EEG’s and other measurement methods). In my case, I was keen to study the results of my ability to read the human aura. I have long since determined that what I was seeing was not somehow a fabrication of an imagined result, but that I was able to accurately see the fields of awareness of thoughts and feelings as well as the physical health state of a person at a glance. I have been able to accurately see illness in the body, pain, as well as see images of the thoughts of people, which for me have shown up as vivid images in the auric field. I have seen mental illness expressed in specific ways, too. What’s more, I have found that built into this sense was the capacity to see the images before the person spoke them, which was itself very telling to me that I was indeed on to something. I have been able to see the auric field of a person move first and then I have seen how the physical body would move into the exact location as the aura field had moved. I saw a professor move his auric arm into a new position while his right hand a few seconds later went into that same position. I have seen this effect many times, and it has all suggested to me that indeed, we think first and then seconds later, follow our thoughts through physical action. It has been this lag that has shown me how it was impossible for me to have simply guessed these movements to have happened in the way that they did.

A part of this inner sensing that the brain interprets into vivid imagery which we call the aura or human energy field, is that we cannot actually see this energy with our eyes. Speaking with a physiological psychologist, I asked if it was possible for the brain to receive and interpret data not coming from the physical senses, in putting it into a sensory portion of the brain, in say, vision. He said without hesitation, “Absolutely.”I would go one further to say that all psychic senses use this same kind of translation, using the brain as a faithful translator of inner sensory information. For those of you who have had experience with clairsentience for example, you can perhaps begin to realize how developed this “translational” ability is in the brain….as if it was designed to do this (which I suspect it is).

A number of years ago while standing outside at nighttime, I was standing by a small maple tree whose tip extended upwards of about 15 feet above me. I noticed that I was able to see energy, auric field type energy, flowing from the tree. I had never seen this before and I was interested in what on earth was going on. I saw these brilliant bits of energy that expressed themselves as vivid sparks of energy, small balls of energy that were traveling up the trunk of the tree and out through its branches. These bits of auric energy continued upward, leaving the tree as they floated upwards like sparks into the sky. As I watched I was aware that what was happening was two-fold: the energy in the tree was balancing itself as it was doing what we think of as dreaming. One of the facets of reading fields is that there is always a deeper understanding of the phenomenon that is being viewed (because it is an inner sense). In the same way that pollen and seeds are dispersed so too does its consciousness energy disperse even though the individual consciousness is never lessened itself.

A few years later, on the advice of a friend, I was harvesting some flowers at night from some plants near my studio in order to make flower essences. At the time, the sky was overcast and it was almost completely dark. I had to walk up to where I knew the flowers were, and as I did so, I noticed something interesting. As I moved along where the flowers were growing, my hands skimming over their tops (I was like Hellen Keller at this point because there was so little light that I had to feel my way around) I noticed that at a certain point the quality of the energy of the flowers changed abruptly. In fact, the change was rather noticeable. It felt like one section of the plants had a more masculine feeling while another section of the same group felt feminine. I moved my hands over them again and got the same result. This was curious, I thought. Was there a difference between what seemed to be the same stand of flowers?

The next day I went out to where these wildflowers were. They were a very small flower, hard to even see even in daylight and as I walked over to them I noticed that I was standing in about the same place as I had the night before. As I looked at them, I noticed that at the point where I felt the plants had changed their energy, expressed at what felt like masculine and then feminine, I saw that the flowers changed color. There were two different varieties present. On one side, they were a pale blue and on the other side, a light yellow. Was I able to see the colors of these flowers? I had no memory of being able to do so in the dark. Was I perhaps picking up on other smaller clues at the edges of my own physical senses in the darkness? I suppose it could be possible. However, with as strong a result as I was getting with my inner senses, I have my doubts that this was all just interpreting something from bits and scraps of sensory data.

A few years ago while watching a TED Talk, I came across a talk by a researcher who described how plants that have the ability to pull in their leaves when brushed against, showed that these plants have the ability t learn. They dropped the plants in their planters from a height over and over, providing time for the plant’s systems to recover so the effect could be repeated. What she found was that after the sixth time this drop was completed, the plants stopped responding to this stimulus. They had learned, she contended, that this stimuli was not a danger to them. I would post this video now for your reference but in searching for it, it did not come up through my searches in preparing this article. Other research has shown that plants communicate and that they may have emotional responses. I can recall reading in East West Journal as a child how in the early 70’s scientists published the results of an experiment where they hooked up a house plant to a lie detector and dropped live shrimp into boiling water from across the room. The electrical activity on the lie detector, that the plant put out during this experiment, was described as a “scream.” The researcher who conducted these tests was named Cleve Backster.

Backster and his collaborators went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces, onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for the International Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant

The aboriginal people in the Yucatan Peninsula when asked how they had managed to find plants with the same physical chemistry told Terrence McKenna that the plants themselves told them. When Terrance asked how this was achieved, they took him into a ceremony where a form of DMT was used. Using DMT, they were able to speak to the plants, what they described were the spirits of the plants. Similarly, those who have taken ayahuasca have described experiences where they encounter the spirit of the plant, which helps them in healing psychological problems that they have. Native Americans have described how they have communicated with trees for ages, so this awareness is nothing new. It seems that science is just now beginning to catch up with experiments that are just beginning, for the Western world, to unravel the inner life of plants and how they exhibit evidence of sentience. I think that the mainstream is late to the party.

So what gives? Belief, that’s what. Most of us have been taught that the only real thinking and feeling being on this planet is the human. There has even been the theory (or belief) that other mammals, like cows, don’t feel pain like we do, something that we now clearly know is not the case at all. Even in less “sophisticated” life forms we see reactions to pain and stress that are hard to deny or ignore. I think we do this in order to gloss over the violence that we do to these other life forms by making the assumption that without a nervous system there is no way for a living thing to feel pain or emotion. Saying and believing this makes us feel better, it makes us feel like we are off the hook. As time goes by and more work is done in this field I think we will see a world that is alive with sentience, awareness, and consciousness. Investigation into the world of plants is beginning to show that a central nervous system or brain is necessary for expressing (and our measuring) sentience.

The great thing that all of this suggests to me is that we can access these other consciousnesses with our own consciousness. Consciousness is a kind of “technology” that is perfectly suited for understanding and learning more if you learn how to use it in that way. The only thing that stands in your way is your own bias or belief that it could never possibly be true. In my experiments into remote viewing I was able to see how matter is formed at the subatomic scale. In this amazing experience, I saw how particles, which had no mass, would appear as if on cue within the form of a subatomic particle and then merge with another complimentary particle of opposite charge in order to create the appearance of physicality at the subatomic level. Now this was incredible to see and impossible to believe at first. But when I began doing some research into this experience, I found that there were theoretical physicists who were describing much the same thing. They described how matter is formed through the interaction of “matched pairs” of energetic particles that created the phenomenon of matter. The only thing missing from their theory was the presence of particles that were themselves aware (which was what I saw). When I first experienced this amazing result the first few times that I tried it, the effect was revolutionary. I wanted to run out into the street and ask people, “Have you seen this???” What I found in my research was that there was a whole group of physicists who had found that at the base of matter at the quantum level, was consciousness. If you don’t know what they were on about, then study what is called “The Measurement Problem” and you will be holding the tail of the cosmic tiger. It is no surprise that so many people in consciousness studies often quote material from these physicists who belonged to a branch of research called Quantum Mechanics. What I would say is that initially, those scientists found some amazing things and then…..nothing. It wasn’t carried much further. Some of its members did go on to do work in the field of consciousness studies, but it was a movement that seemed to die on the vine in the sense that there wasn’t a new generation of physicists who sought to then use their own consciousness to probe into what this facet of matter being conscious might actually mean in a larger more expanded understanding. This is most likely because the discoveries of those physicists like Bohm, Plank, and Heisenberg strained the belief systems of people at the time and we all collectively retreated into our familiar beliefs that the world really is just a bunch of atoms that as Alfred North Whitehead once asked,”blindly run.”

What this does for me is it shows or opens up a door of awareness that there is still much to learn and to know about our world. Consciousness, for me, is a tool that we can indeed use for understanding what science is not ready yet to examine. You can learn how to use it to do this probing and exploration. One of the most easy ways to begin doing this is through remote viewing. You can read up on how it is done and then conduct experiments for yourself in a completely blind environment. You might need a friend who can go to a location, perhaps photograph what they see and experience, and then report back once you have written down your impressions. This is how remote viewing works, and while in the beginning it might be useful for you to do experiments like the one I just described, as you see the results of your experiments bear fruit, you can move into areas where it is harder for you to confirm what it is you are viewing (like consciousness of other life forms for example). It is also something that the ancients have been doing for a very long time. In the words of the Sutra of Pentenjali, when one attains to a certain level of awareness in consciousness, a person so endowed can look at the stars and know their composition, can look at a person and know their secrets and their thoughts.This is so because consciousness itself is not limited in the way that we think that it is. That goes for plants and the so-called “lower” animals. And I think that what this examination can do is to begin to show those who are curious and courageous enough how truly amazing this world is.

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Grace

This Wonderworld

I am lucky, I think, to live in an area that has such a variety of locations out in nature that can be explored and enjoyed. Here in these mountains there are many little-known locations that have remained pristine. There are swimming holes, carefully guarded (hush hush) for fear of their certain popularity ruining them. Down a country road that goes from hardtop to dirt, a bridge that sways down low so the waters can roll over it in case of a flood….very old school. I know of no other bridge quite like that. But there it is still, a few miles from my boyhood home, around three curves and you are where that swimming hole is. You would never know it because it is tucked up around a hill behind some trees. Park in the field, a scramble over moss-covered rocks, a dip through mountain laurel, a massive stone outcropping and down it goes, slanting all the way to the river.

There are mountains high enough to give you a 35 mile view on clear days. A double falls, cascades, and many lesser-known caves which will take you from a grand room down a shaft 40 feet below, and a journey through a horizontal shaft where you walk in an underwater creek, bent over. Most just crawl in the water.

Covered bridges, rivers, swimming holes, caves, artisan studios!

So it was a few days ago that I took my nephew up into our mountains to go see a local waterfall. it is perhaps one of my top five favorite hikes. While walking up to the Falls, I thought about how I had climbed a mountain in my old stomping grounds in these Blue Ridge Mountains some 20 years ago. I had gone up there just after a storm had rolled through. I was moving up to the summit and as I did I came across a wild tiger lily. Delicate, orange, gold, yellow with flecks of brown and maroon, the sight had been burned into my visual memory. I have always been partial to wild varieties of flowers for how delicate they are. Many domesticated varieties seek to get a flower to heavy and big that it limps its way along on its stem. These wild varieties, something about them is just….so sexy because they are wild, natural, like the goddess in her natural state. No pretense. And as I was about to tell my companion about this experience I came around the bend and voila! A single tiger lily, identical to the one I had seen in the backwoods all those years ago, a sight I had not had the chance to have again….until that very moment.

So what are the chances? The timing, perfect, we kept moving as the sky dropped rain. As we passed a family on our way we said “hows it going!” In the rain the Dad smiled and said “Lovin’ it!” I replied, “I know just what you mean!”

In the dappled sunlight, wild flowers, all natural and indigenous varieties met us along the way.

Rhododendron is everywhere. It is a vine-like bush that carpets the forests and likes shade. It has flowers through most of the summer. Their scent is so mild that it is easy to miss, but when you know it, you never forget it. This variety is kin to the bay which we use for cooking. The leaves are a very very large version of the cooking variety. Hard and waxy, these are evergreen plants.

 

Top view of the tiger lily: its petals fold all the way backwards!

 

Our path through the woods is covered in rhododenron.

A millipede crosses our path, hundreds of legs operating in perfectly synchrony

A remnant of the Depression era WPA, a works project called CCA was used to build wild mountain trails in our neck of the woods. These were most often college-aged men who would spend their summers up in the mountains felling trees and dragging stone into the hills to build rugged trails. Our Cascades were the recipient of just such a program. While I like the idea of clambering over the boulders that line the path up the small gorge that leads to the Falls up ahead, the pathways are pretty great.

 

 

 

With a place like this, who needs temples and churches and ashrams? This world of mine is a temple where I feel the God and Goddess moving in stick, stone, moss, river, and sky. And at the top of our journey into the woods? A great waterfall and one heck of a swimming hole beneath it!

I don’t need anyone to tell me what to believe or think or feel. I am here, directly linked into nature. if there ever was a religion for me, this is certainly it. I worship the wonder of nature, the grace carried in a smile, and those moments no camera can capture so the mind remembers ever-more-vividly. Sometimes I feel I could just melt into nature completely and just fade from the self I was into something akin to dryads or nymphs….aligned to the forces of nature….barely there….but felt. Can you feel it?

So in every corner of this world there is so much to be thankful for. For nature, I am thankful.

Keys Strewn Through Nature

In the depth of Fall, a flower begins to bud and bloom. What could it be?

It is my sense that it is just as possible to know inner truth through reflecting upon nature than going to church or attending an ashram or spiritual meeting place. But to do it requires wonder.  And joy.  If you can approach it with this sense of newness as though the day has just dawned for you the first time even though you KNOW it has dawned countless times before, you have the opportunity to glimpse this incredible thing.  Through it, you can glimpse the masterwork of the Maker. In seeing this masterwork, you can get an idea as to the level of dedication and truly incredible detail that has gone into just such a production.  I awoke extra early today, at four in the morning for some mysterious reason, but it served to give me a nice jump on the day which also meant I was out and doing some garden work extra early, planting some seeds for a fall garden and preparing a bed that is perfect now for some new things to over-winter…..

I am finishing up some notes on this book I have been working on for the last four years now and I was reading through this one section early in my awakening experience where I wrote this piece that came out so fast….and it got me thinking about all of these issues, these ideas, thoughts, feelings all tied to ourselves, to our landscape, how we are connected to it and how we can live in harmony with it.  And when I say that, I mean an evolving real sense of harmony based on things that are real and tangible.  Its a great thought to WANT to be in harmony, but you aren’t in harmony unless you ARE.  You know?  Hunger in Mogidishu continues even though I wish there wasn’t hunger there.  For it to end something substantive has to be done about it that doesn’t make it worse and makes it possible for it not to happen again.  So what I am getting around to saying is, I think it would be great if we could develop technology more along the lines of green things…..chemistry that is entirely in harmony with its environment that doesn’t make things worse.  Is that possible?  Do things plants put off wind up degrading and turning into harmful substances in larger numbers when they wind up being carried down, say, a watershed into bays and lakes?

The new mystery flower buds up close

Nature has a lot to teach us about cooperation, about technology and how we can have a clean and verdant future by developing ways of living with nature that harmonize with it instead of possibly poisoning it. Imagine a world where solar panels are tree leaves and store energy like trees do….wait….that means that solar panels ARE leaves. Exactly.  Perhaps we need to consider how we can extract energy cheaply from the energy stored by living things without the creation of deadly chemicals in the process.  Or, perhaps we can create technology that merges with nature in some way where there are fewer conflicts, such as what GMO’s are known to do.  If you aren’t up on it, the issue with GMO’s is how the modified genetic material made by humans can wind up in other native species of plants through cross pollination or by other means.  We say for example that we have ways to keep these things out of the population, but there have been instances of genetically modified fish making their way into native populations and wiping out the native populations out because these newcomers take on weight faster and compete more aggresively for food, for example.  So I know I might be going far afield, here, but the thinking here is that nature itself has done an incredible job in getting things figured out.  We should be spending more time studying how nature did it and emulating it based on its millions of years scale rather than a CEO’s ten year tenure, or an engineers career in the GMO industry, for example.  Nature has had time to figure all these things out.  Its an off-the-shelf miracle we could learn a lot from if we knew how to.

I know by looking to nature that our lives could be very different were we to want them to be.  Instead of the old way where we create all kinds of compounds hostile to nature, we could put our inventiveness to ways to NOT harm nature while still growing the food we need to feed the humans on the planet.

What I am saying is that its really worth it to get out into nature.  Even during this time of year, in the Northern Hemisphere, when everything seems to be falling away and going to sleep, there is a great deal of life happening.

Today, as I walked through my flower garden at the house I noticed that a flower I had planted but had not yet ever flowered, was now starting to flower in the presence of cooler weather!  In fact, this was a plant I had lost track of and could not figure out what it was exactly. It was BIG….and I wondered, why was it not blooming?  I had some plants that did not come up from their seed this year, but this one plant was a mystery.  It grew big and bushy but never put out a single flower all summer long!  But wait!  Not so fast!  Her come the blooms!  So just as I am getting ready for things to go bye-bye, something new comes along just to give me a delightful curve ball! All of this since my last post about my work in the garden preparing seeds for next years’ growing season.  The flower I am speaking of are the buds that are shown at the top of this page.  The other flowers are all flowers that are blooming as of today.

I also found that my Thai Basil is looking truly incredible with its purple flowers.   I snipped a sprig and tasted it; sometimes I really love herbs when they are flowering.  It seems their flowers add something interesting to the flavor of the herb.  The Rosemary, for example, is suddenly flowering, and this was a new plant that I put in this spring and it has quite suddenly begun a growth spurt.  I put it nearest the steps so that I could smell its fragrance as I go out to snip a piece of it for cooking.  I like that my herbs are in with my flowers.  It makes me feel that much closer, more intimate with them.

My Thai Basil in flower ~ Isn’t the flower so beautiful? Like an iris or snapdragon or….

 

Not very long ago a hummingbird discovered my flower patch.  It was a brilliant peacock green colored hummer.  I noted that it was making a habit of coming to the flowers and spent a lot of time going around to each one many times each day.  I noticed that it often came around lunch time, so I made a plan to spend a little time out by the flowers in early afternoon.  I was rewarded the first time I tried this.  A hummingbird came to the flowerbed within minutes of my walking outside.  I had been standing stock still for many minutes and the hummingbird came in perfect timing.  I was able to watch as the bird flew from flower to flower just a couple of feet from me.  Realize that the flowerbed I am talking about is right along the walkway in front of my house, so I was standing almost in the flower bed.  The hummingbird did a curious thing, though, and I think it was checking me out; it flew in front of me and looked at me and then it flew up and then flew to my side farthest from the flowers, which resulted in its flying from one side of me to the other by going over my head.  Its path, though, was within about a foot of my head as I could hear and feel it track in a very even path around me as it checked me out. I have gotten close to hummingbirds, but never like this.  It is events like this that make creating a flowerbed so worthwhile.

There are ants on my plants!

What I like is how nature creates so much opportunity for life.  Ants come to check out the cigar plants (I forget the Latin names) as there is something that attracts them, and that the ants probably help with.  The Peonies are attended by many ants that take the nectar that come from the flowers and seem to assist with the bloom of these remarkable flowers. There are several bees found everyday at the flowers, and a number of butterflies and moths as well as spiders. All this life springing up, creating a teeming island of life.  it makes me wonder what will happen when I expand the gardens next Spring and include sweet smelling flowers of many different kinds.

I go to the raspberry bushes and I note with a great deal of amusement that bumblebees LOVE raspberry blooms and even now my raspberries continue to bloom and bear. As they do, the bumbles seem to camp out, going over them over and over like some star-crossed lover might.  I know it may not be fair to place such human traits on a bee of all things, but to watch them you would think they are drunk with their affection for these berry blooms.  I wonder why raspberries of all things?  A rabbit has taken to liking to hide out in the growing bush of the raspberry patch and often shoots out like a cannon ball from a canon after I have plucked a few ripe berries from the bushes.

This is a simple form of worship, but it is worship just the same.  I do worship this masterwork because I know to even mention what a sheave of grass represents is nothing short of an entire miracle or twenty miracles all working together in some amazing way.  And it is in such places I put my attention and miraculously I find peace, a strengthening of the flow of energy within me, a sense of health and happiness I often miss when bound up in other work. Being an artist, I love to make things, and perhaps I observe nature for hints on design and on the still deeper nature of….NATURE!   I can see how observing nature levels the self and enlivens the soul.  I smell a flower and it sends me to other worlds now.  I see something new crawling over the fence and I follow it back to its source, amazed at where its seed could have emerged.  I have stroked flowers and felt a jolt of energy that was so clear and so perfect that I have come to realize there is something in nature.  Actually IN nature for me to find that heals.  It means slowing down and observing, rolling around in the grass a little.

Once, a very long time ago, I used to have dreams my first year in art school about Picasso.  Now, I want you to know I really do not like Picasso’s work.  In fact, there isn’t a single piece of his work that I really feel COMFORTABLE around.  Be that as it may, something in me chose to create him or I had some exchange with someone who came as Picasso. He came about three times and each time he had something to impart  about art.  The first one had him with his bottom up in the air and his head in the grass.  He had planted himself just outside my dorm room building in a small patch of grass.  I walked up to him and he saw me under the crook in his arm and turned to gesture for me to come close.  He said for me to get down to his level and look closely. He said “There are worlds in things….but you must first learn to see them….”  so we sat crouched over ourselves in this patch of grass and as I did so, my vision took in a piece of grass maybe six inches square.  As I did this I saw how I noticed ants and small mites of some sort along with a spider and a whole world of things growing down there.  Pablo watched me with those big eyes of his and said “Look closer….” and as I did I noticed that there were these very small mushrooms growing down beneath the level of the grass.  I watched and saw grains of sand and all kinds of things I had never seen before.  It was a world down there in a small inconsequential patch of grass!  As I watched, the mushrooms began to light up!  My head moved up and out of the grass as I had, no doubt, a stunned look on my face.  Picasso looked at me with eyebrows arched as the dream faded.  I think that nature is like this….a world of things that we often miss, but could learn so much from.

Kale in my summer garden, ready to become my winter garden….

Gardening is incredibly therapeutic. I encourage you to give it a try since it increases your enjoyment of your space.  I am sure someone has a study that reveals the link between something remarkable and what we do when we garden.

Over the last few days I have been sprouting mustard seed in order to grow mustard in a fall garden.  I am told that cool weather improves greens so I am growing both kale and mustard to try this out. The mustard was taken from a large packet of seeds bought four years ago, seed that ought not to be fertile, and yet is showing a remarkable level of fertility for being so old and not fresh.  These were seed I bought the Spring before I moved from my home during a separation from my-then wife. It was a garden I never got to plant, and yet this seed has returned two years’ worth of growth from this packet of heirlooms.  A squash plant that was lovely that I had planted he year before skipped growing the three years that my ex was in residence at my home but then chose to sprout up in the yard whereupon it grew a nice fat Italian heirloom squash that makes great stuffed squash.  It was like some weird gardening miracle or something.  I sowed the sprouted seed today into my compost area, which is  a large planter I have taken over for the task of “growing” new soil of special projects (like a flower bed, or berry bushes, or my fig trees, etc.).

The truth is, its the life force that is in all of these things that fascinate me so much.  I wish I could give everyone the awareness that has settled in and made nests in my heart and soul….for this sense has liberated love in a way hard to explain so that it can be rightly understood.  It is wonder taken beyond what I used to feel until it becomes something like love struck fascination, amazement, wonder and awe…..and all of this because of something like GRASS or a flower petal!  These, oldest of all life on the planet, rooted still, seem to bear such hidden wonder to our too quickened ways….it is time for us to slow down a little and garden….

In The Garden

   My name means “keeper of the Park.”  As I grow older, I develop a deeper appreciation for nature with each passing year.  Awakening had a lot to do with it.  There were times in awakening that the living things helped me to have clearer energy.  It is hard to explain, but its as though you become this live wire with everything around you.  Suddenly you see or feel into another world of experience.  It can make you feel a little unsettled at first, but for me now, its an important and sacred part of the experience.  Touching nature from the inside out.  

 

 

Some months before my awakening I was feeling this flush of energy and wrote something called “The Yearning.” This thing spilled out of me so fast that when I looked at the clock on the computer, I could hardly believe my eyes.  Whatever this was, it really came out of me like a lightening bolt!  The piece was actually about awakening, even though I didn’t know it at the time.  It also wound up being so similar to passages within The Gospel of Thomas that it left me scratching my head in wonder…

But in that piece, I was writing about how nature surely feels the flush of passion and desire, else, why go on?  Surely all of life here is enlivened by the pleasure principle, the passion that fills root and vein and all else here, keeping us bound to this great circle of life and re-creation. In the piece it was October and I was looking back on the change of the seasons.  Now, seven or eight years later, I am now doing the same.

 

I have been slowly but surely developing my properties with flowers and plants of all kinds.  At my studio I have butterfly bushes and lillies as well as Mums and some herbs like oregano and sage.  At home I have grown a caucophany of flowers from succulents to lilies, wildflowers, tall flowers, shortflowers, bright and dark ones as well.  With the flowers coming to their end, I have taken to saving their seeds.  This is itself a meditative practice that gives me time to honor the beauty these plants gave and the island of life they created with hummingbirds, moths, butterflies, bees of all kinds, and other flying insects (along with a spider or two). There is something very fulfilling about seeing so much activity spring up out in the yard.

So it is this time of year that I have been collecting seeds.  I take them apart and take out their seeds, slowly winnowing the chaff to get down to the seed.  I have a broad range of saved seeds now on my table.  It looks like some kind of natural history exhibit!  IN the last few weeks my daughter has helped me gather seeds and I am very proud to say that I have enough seed to increase my plantings a hundred times over what they were this past season!  Its fabulous, really.  I can now plant seed in other places and create whole islands of new flower beds, which leads me into spring with a light step and a flutter in my heart.  I can hardly wait!  And when that time does come, what other flowers will I go and pick out at the nursery to add to the wild array of flowers now silent and still, existing for now as seeds?  Given what has been happening to genetic diversity and seed viability, I take it upon myself to save seed that are genetically safe, non GMO, and viable as organisms.

The raspberries have quadrupled and I am getting ready to replant them in an ever extending bed, and my two fig cuttings have begun to bush out.  Next year it might be plums, cherries, and…..what else….(suggestions are welcome!)….

 

 

Over the last few weeks we took photos of the garden, my daughter and I.  Its nice to think about what took place there and how three red flower plants will not turn into a hundred as a single flower bud offers up as many seeds.
Every day upon Gaia is a wonderful gift.  Being able to watch things grow and to enjoy the swell of life that it creates is simply great.  Some of life’s greatest pleasures are the simplest.