Love Grows with Reciprocity

Barbara will be presenting a workshop showing her DVD “Healing Burned Woman”
 June 26 & 27 in Santa Cruz,  Center for Spiritual Living
Reservation 831 335-3145
Friday night is free. Showing Burned Woman’s Story, Nature and Barbara’s Story, 7:00-9:30
Saturday Workshop: 10:30 – 3:30 $44.00. Day of Workshop $55.00
Using movement, chalks, awareness questions ritual, the focus is to:

• Empower you to recognize and honor your inner guidance and spiritual gifts.
• Heal scars left from the Burning Times.

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The garden in this beautiful spot where I live has 40 rose bushes in it. Last year I helped tend them, picking off black-spot leaves regularly, pruning, wishing them well. This year they were under stress because of a freeze after their spring growth had begun, and I made a commitment to them to clean up two a day. The connection, however, felt different to me this time, because I decided to involve them in the work, through asking questions via the pendulum. My grandson and I sprayed a few leaves and asked: “Would you like this milk-water spray to protect from black-spot?” Then we did the same with the soda-water spray. My grandson (2 ½) observed that plants can’t talk because they don’t have mouths. But he went along with the idea that they could communicate using the pendulum.

I was surprised at how decisive the pendulum response was: almost all preferred the milk, though some wanted both, and a couple didn’t want either. The thing is, our exuberant involvement with the plants made me want to tend them, to get out to them in the morning. The work had the quality of desire, of playfulness. It wasn’t just a mundane work project that I became obsessed with finishing, out of an old work ethic that surely began with the pride I took in my father’s praise as I learned to finish big jobs in good time at the family newspaper office. This was slower and calmer; I sat with the roses quietly sometimes, deliberately not doing, I asked for their names, I drew a map of where they all were and made notes. I sang to them and talked with them. Thinking of Barbara’s exercise mentioned in the last blog, I focused attention in my heart and asked it to expand—simply asking and allowing. This whole process took hours; 40 roses is an impressive number, and by the time I finished pruning them all, the early recipients had started getting more black-spotted leaves. But still I didn’t feel the old weariness of over-extending. I think I am beginning to LOVE the plants in the garden, like the elderly woman in Michael Roads’ story from last month.

In Roads’ book Conscious Gardening he says: “This love, this passion for the garden, is not rare among gardeners. Far more rare is taking that passion to a higher level. . . . I have no idea when it began, but somewhere over the years my love affair with Nature naturally developed into a mystical romance. . . . Most people would agree that passion is a powerful spiritual movement, a feeling of deep inner intensity. Surely it becomes obvious that the spirit of the gardener is moved by the spirit of the garden, by the Spirit of Nature.” The missing ingredient in so many gardeners, Michael Roads says, “is to be conscious of the meeting of self and Nature while working in the garden.”

Yes, that’s it. When I begin to be moved by the spirit of the plants, or the air pressing back on my skin, or a welling up from the earth into my feet—when I begin to feel reciprocity—then I approach the being-in-love state.

Barbara lives in this state a lot, I think. Here’s an illustrative notation from her notebooks: “Sometime yesterday as I was relating with nature, with the sunset and the trees, I felt the union of marriage with the earth. Marriage to the earth is a mystical marriage.”

In another, the Council of Gnomes greets Barbara with,“Congratulations! We see the shift from having to connect with the garden to wanting to connect. Keep building up this feeling of being in love with nature and your garden. Yesterday’s work was a true love feast.” They also congratulated her for having the wisdom to nap afterward (always a good idea in my experience). “Your long nap gave you time to integrate and incorporate the love exchange you had with nature in the garden. If you had come in and moved right into eating and desk-work, that sweet communion would have been short-changed. Your fatigue was not from the work done. It was our way of withdrawing energies that were in resistance and replacing them with the upwelling energy of expansion, delight and joy, which you felt all afternoon and evening. When you are filled with a zest for life, passion for living, and enthusiasm, thousands of rays of Divine Love radiate out and penetrate the auras of the people, the plants, animals and nature beings you are with.”

Pamela Montgomery, another presenter in the “Guardians of Nature” telesummit I mentioned last month, spoke at a recent workshop about being in “coherence” when our heart releases oxytocin (as at birth, death, and peak experiences). If we consciously “turn up the dimmer switch, raise the set point”, she suggests, this balancing into coherence happens naturally. I’ve begun taking note (literally leaving notes for myself because it’s so easy for me to forget)—reminders of what wakes up and nourishes in me this sense of peace, well-being, and genuine enthusiasm. Everyone, of course, has their unique triggers for bringing themselves to life.

Barbara’s gnome guides are always encouraging her toward this state of love. “You are being called to unconditional love,” they say. “For you that is to accept with love whatever is happening and hold in your consciousness a feeling of expansion, more love and light. Do not contract by judging another as less than whole. Each is living the fullest he or she is capable of in the moment. And the next moment can always bring change. Your family and friends must wake up on their own. You cannot do it for them by giving them hints, by pushing or prodding. Your job is to Be Love, to stay in your vast heart and whole mind, and to enjoy the process totally. There is no right or wrong way. Each has been taught and shares what he or she has learned. It would be well if you did not negate another’s way, just because it is not yours. Be quietly and openly present with each person. When you are together move into your whole mind and heart and speak whatever words come to be said.”

Then follows a “plan of action” for social events—one I’ll bet would work for experiences in nature as well. I often realize that although I have greeted a tree or flower, I then drift off in my thoughts (and then with my feet) without completing the interaction or saying farewell. In the gnomes’ recommended plan of action, “You arrive at all events with your energy totally present. Ask, ‘How may I serve the people, nature, the angels, the Spirit?’ When you leave say goodbye personally to people. Withdraw your energy from the land and ask for blessings on all the people, on nature, and on the angels.”

Then, harking back to basics, Barbara reminds us: “During the three months I first connected daily with Mano in the amphitheater, he asked me to say hello to the plants, to send love, and thank them. This guidance happened so often I thought I was making up the conversation. Now I see this as the most important thing to do when establishing a relationship with nature spirits. Each time I send love and appreciation, in return I am filled with a feeling of love.”