Choose Love

REMINDER from Mano:

Barbara has chosen to stay in the house on the couch most of this past month. I helped her chose this Blog from Mary Jane to encourage her to go outside this evening and send love to all of the plants waiting to be planted.

REMARKS from Barbara:

I have no rhyme or reason for being so stationary this past month other than I love my new house and totally enjoy sitting on the couch and working on the big coffee table. I will enjoy my adventure into the garden this evening.

REMEMBERING Mary Jane:

What a treasure and blessed resource to have 68 blogs written by Mary Jane as a rescue when I am wanting a rest between blogs. Thank you, my dear friend.

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Choose Love

Blog #123

by Mary Jane Di Piero
Originally presented in May 2015

On a tip-off from Barbara, I have been listening to the April 1 to 14 talks from the “Guardians of Nature” telesummit. I missed most of them in real time but decided to purchase replay access. So far, each of them has held something quite important for me —a reminder, a coherence with Barbara’s notebooks, a new thought or anecdote that has caught my imagination and thus can serve as a touchstone.

The “Choose Love” title comes from Australian Michael Roads, who ends his talk with this encouragement: in every situation, every confrontation, consciously choose love (and that would be unconditional love—the only real kind, he says). He tells about learning to garden as a boy in England and visiting a 90-year-old woman in a cottage with a high wall in back that virtually blocked all sunlight. Nonetheless, the plants in her garden were blossoming wildly, in a proliferation that should not have been possible. He knew that these particular plants absolutely required sun and couldn’t figure out what was going on—until he had an idea and asked his elderly friend: “Do you love your garden?” “Yes!” she exclaimed, “I love my plants.” He understood then that she was the sun in her garden, and that her love for the plants allowed a bending of the rules.

That, surely, is a clue to answering my questions about accessing the elemental world—just become suffused with love, as a habit, as a striving, a longing, a treasure found in deep quiet. Sometimes it’s a simple matter; sometimes it’s a struggle to re-tune to an almost-forgotten alignment. Marko Pogacnik, in his book, World Changes, presents an exercise the nature spirits gave him for offering this love to the world. “Their accompanying message,” he says, “is that people in general always keep their hearts nearly closed and share love only among themselves. As a result, there is a lack of love in the air. This is a particular problem for the fairy folk because it is primarily from the power of love that they can ‘knit’ a joyous and uplifting psychic atmosphere for each locality [and purify the air, Barbara adds]. They simply cannot do it properly any more. People, like all other beings, are expected to give out the power of their hearts in exchange for the power of life they receive from nature.” Soon after receiving this message Marko’s body elemental added another step designed to consciously build up the love energy internally before sending it into the world.

It’s very much like the exercise Barbara uses for moving into her expanded heart:

Focus my attention in my heart.
Ask my heart to expand . . . and expand . . . and expand again.
I don’t do anything to make it expand.

I just ask and allow it to expand.
When I feel the expansion, I continue with what is next to do.

In doing these exercises it feels true to me that love has varying degrees of intensity and heat, and that with attention (asking and allowing) I can raise the temperature and radiate out with more abandon, less self-consciousness, more joy, less tepidness. And then, of course, my attempts are met with nature’s love.

Barbara customarily begins a Council of Gnomes session with, “I greet you in love.” One of the responses to this setting-of-the-tone was: “This is what we come for, the love of a human, your love. When you worry that you have not done enough, your love is not present and we are not fed. We would like you to feel our love for you. We would like you to be nourished by this love and come to nature often to receive our infilling. Our love is not personal; it is the love of the Mother, which comes through us without thought, plan, or direction. Your love is also of the Mother, yet it can be turned on or off according to the focus of your thought and feeling. As you walk in nature and receive the blessing of the Mother, the love you give back to us is multi-dimensional, because it merges with your own consciousness, your personal I AM. When you send only your love, without first receiving from the Mother, consciously welling up with her presence, the love and appreciation you send to us is a weak and puny monotone in comparison to what we receive when you are full to overflowing.”

In another Guardians of Nature talk, Susan Raven, from Wales, makes clear that living in love also requires self-love, the putting aside of worries that we aren’t enough, or haven’t done enough. What the elementals dislike the most, she says, is self-berating. For them, “it leaves a stench.”

In another council session, Glorious Gnome says to Barbara, “I watch you as you come and go. You miss so much. I want to tell you of the possibilities waiting for your deeper awareness. When you learn to look at us from your grounded heart, through the eyes of love, that same love will come back to you sevenfold. I want you to be aware of this, so you will see the great benefit of keeping at this process of change. Again I wish to say, what you do to build your energy level is a blessing for us and for all who touch your aura. You have already been given the way: Touch your heart center, right at your breast bone, and drop your energy, your consciousness, to the center of the earth; pull the earth energy back up to your heart and then move on that earth power to do what needs to be done. The love that comes through the earth and your body, through your heart, is a totally different experience than the love of the emotional body or the love of the mental body. All love is of God.”