What is the price of growth?

What price is there on growth?

I have an outdoor plant that, I think someone gave me for Mother’s Day one year. It is one of my favorite plants…here is why: Every mid-summer it gets all dried out and crackly and looks dead. The first year, I had the plant and it did this, I think I was recovering from a surgery and didn’t throw it away. Every Spring it comes back and blooms like crazy for five months and then it appears to die.

The second year, I noticed the pattern and then I tried to encourage it. If it looked a little dry; I would water it with a little fertilizer in the water. Faithfully, it comes back year after year. I do not clear away the dead parts, like most people say a person should do…

I have other plants in the front yard that are of a different sort. These plants, also flower but only parts of them seem to die. Their beautiful blooms at some point, die but only the “heads” of the flowers dry and shrivel up. When this happens, I have noticed that if you pinch the dead heads off, they renew in a few weeks or so.

The difference is in some ways miraculous. What if I had given up on the backyard plant? I could have thrown it a way the first year, but I didn’t. It just needed a time of resting and renewal that is longer than other plants. So, I tend to it in a way that it seems to need. The front yard plants are a whole different story. They need more attention and care. I don’t favor one set of plants over the other. I wonder if in some ways, us humans are similar.

I believe in what other people like me believe, that there is a principal that we call “Mind.” We believe and teach that there is an intelligence behind all things. This intelligence can go by many names: Universal Mind, The Intelligence behind all things, God, The Great Spirit, The Goddess, Mother Earth, or The Creator. I am sure there are many others. I believe that like any good Gardener, this invisible energy gives us what we need to grow and flourish. I am not going to preach to you, but I do want to “plant a seed.” Some of us are like my backyard plant.

We struggle through times when we need to be quiet and rest so that then when we are ready, we can bloom and grow. Reaching out for the right circumstances to show that we are alive and growing. Others of us, bloom in all the glory that we have in the moment and that when that moment has passed, we need to let go of the parts of us that no longer serve us and help us grow. The seeds or blooms that we have passed beyond, to become healthy again.

Naturally, Mind knows what we need: The correct combination of sunlight, soil ph., a little fertilizer (Insights), and water. We act accordingly, and bloom when we feel it is time and we grow like crazy and then need to rest so that we can grow and bloom again.

Others of us need a little more help or help of a different type. There is no right or wrong here, it just is how it is. We need someone to come along and help us become unstuck in our growth, to help us clear away the parts of us that are no longer beneficial so that we can bloom and grow again. We can also need a little help in pulling the weeds around us. The ones that threaten to choke us and want to overpower us and claim our energy as their own.

What is the price of growing and flourishing? I believe it is different for each of us. Sometimes we need to be left alone and other times we need encouragement and help with the weeds around us. We may need or not need a catalyst to spark our growth. We may need to do some tending to the area around us or to remove old tired thoughts and memories to make room for new sprouts of imagination and growth.