The Seed to Sprout Stage

(Continued from Dancing Tree Meditation: be a tree!)

“The tallest oak in the forest was once a little nut that held its ground’’

-Gregory Gunn

Be an Acorn:

Hold yourself in a hug. Curl up to your head, and make a ball like a seed. An egg. An acorn. 

We and trees alike store our data with the language of dna. Be it in eggs or seeds, we keep a patterned template of our forming data called our genes. We are cousins in the same tree of life on earth; we the smart monkeys, the trees, and all life.

A seed wants to fall into a nice warm bed, where it is low and safe and dark. A seed tries to nestle. While a seed might spend the winter under the ground, we bundle up and cuddle up too. We “cocoon”. 

The seed must attach to the earth! The shape, round or oval, gently guides the weight downward, down to ground with the bioelectric field of the great planet field with which we all must harmonize. 

How beautiful, this shell we are in, this sacred sphere.

This is your own tailored mobile aura, your personal office of thought creation and love, that receives and resonates the signal vibration you choose as you go along, wearing it like a car. It can also be a sanctuary of meditation and temple of conception for inspirations and aspirations. 

This seed place is a good place to meditate. Why is it so hard to just pause for a little while? There is a moment when a swing reaches as far as it can go, and reverses direction. This is the magic moment of peace.

Find this seed place of quiet, in your mind, in the elbow of a mindful breath, or curled up in a ball like a seed. Touch in. Go on a retreat. It is a place you can keep and use when you need some peace and quiet. 

“Just as the acorn contains the mighty oak tree, the Self has everything it needs to fulfill its destiny. When the inner conditions are right, it naturally emerges.”-Derik Rydell

Use this space to look forward with clarity and choose your way. When you go out walking and find an acorn on the ground, pick it up and put it in your pocket. When you feel it in there you can remember the quiet feeling of being in the seed meditation place.

Before the sprouting seed sends out a shoot or root, it will swell up with water. The water of life is love, and when the seed cannot contain any more, it reaches out! The first direction it reaches is downward with its little root toes, down to the more water, down to connect with Earth. 

If water is like emotion to us, and the golden emotion is Love, then connecting to Earth is connecting to all love! Indeed, when we are physically, electricly, grounded to the earth, our cortisol levels, or stress hormone levels, plummet. Getting grounded calms and refreshes us, gently lifting our emotional orientation from fear to love. One of the quickest ways to get grounded, is in fact, available in your house by taking a bath or shower. Or going for a walk, preferably barefooted in wet grass. Or hey, go hug a tree!

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”- James Allen

Dancing Tree Meditation

(From the sacred dancing tree meditation book, “play like a tree”)

“ Learn character from trees, values from roots, and change from leaves” - Tasneem Hameed

Anytime, Anywhere, Centering Meditation

You can just be a tree anytime, anywhere. 

You just play like a tree!

Your own special one. What kind of tree are you?

The first thing your treeness will want is a safe place to stand. So maybe, for example, you are standing in line. Let your psychic roots feel their way down, through the floor, homing their way to Earth. Feel your toes stretching out as you sway gently, even imperceptibly to the others in line, firming your balance in this spot. Let your knees bend just a little, to stay supple and bouncy.

You own this spot on earth where you now stand. It is your birthright. I don’t care who “owns” the land, or “property” where you happen to be standing. If you are alive you have the right to be here, taking up space. Feel this truth, breathe it in.

 Check your posture. Relax, even as you allow your spine to straighten as you now can stand a bit taller, confident in your place of belonging, in line here, and also in the world, here and now, alive and in harmony with all that is. 

This is tree trunk consciousness, perpendicular to the gravitational field of the planet, an audacious assertion of individual being, a miracle against time. Here you are! What an outrageous implausible amazement! 

Your cylindrical inner core trunk can be viewed in your minds’ eye, from above, to see the tree rings. The dot in the center marks a point in time when you initiated verticalness. The rings go on out from the center like a record of time passing. This pole forms and is reinforced anew, each cycle, over time. It stands as an antenna to the sky, a deliberate link from earth toward the infinite heavens. From the dust, life arises, grows, and reaches up to heaven. Heaven showers light and wisdom.

Varying somewhat from culture to culture in distance, your personal space extends out from your body. This is also your domain, here in line. Feel your arms, as your upper tree limbs, holding the weight you carry, dancing in the atmosphere of the room you are in, asserting the intentions you aspire to, responding to the environment in which you stand. Your limbs can reach out, grow, and are your action. This is your work, your power to build in the world. Perhaps one day these limbs will hold the fruits that you have imagined.

The atmosphere around a tree out standing in the world consists of wind and water, sun, and all of the creatures around. The atmosphere in the line where you are standing consists of light and air, but also the presences of each whirling person-universe around you. You will be in the aura of each one, but most importantly you are in the aura of the universe of you, your current weather, how you are thinking and feeling. This is the leaves and twigs part, of your tree. 

So now, with your roots down and your limbs activated, feel your fingers. Bring your thumb and a finger tip together, and press them into... a thought. There is deep meaning in every body gesture, and the mudra language of the hands and fingers is a further realm of significance and nuance. 

The leaves of the tree shape themselves for, and follow, the light of the day, as it changes, even as we change our thoughts constantly. Our tree leaves quiver in the breeze, and we breathe in our atmosphere, the thoughts and moods in the air around us. We are also light seeking creatures.

Trees respire, releasing emotion-chemicals and particles that make rain, or communicate distress to others. We feel, smell, read, hear, and see the others around us. We react, we can respond. We are changed.

We are awake, present, attuned. We hold our center gracefully, like a flower. We stand at the ready. 

This meditation is not about tuning out the rest of the world. It is to gently hold your center so you can be whatever you are here to be.

(This meditation is on a virtual imaginal app. Just stare at your device, as you stand there in line, with everyone else also gazing into their devices, and pretend it’s on there: there’s even a mental picture of your special medicine tree!)

How Nuts Can Save the World

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”  

―  Chinese proverb

Above: Filbert trees in the park

I like nuts! Nuts like me! Nuts like you! Nuts can save the world. 

We know that food sourcing is at least as responsible for global warming as transportation and energy use. Yet it need not be.

A satisfying meal of vegan food can be many times better for our shared environment than a meat or dairy plate. But some of your satisfaction comes from the concentrated protein and fat that animal body derived food offers. The animal eats a whole bunch of grass, and concentrates it into a liquid food that is whole, complete, and rich in everything a little mammal requires.

Nature is abundant, usually providing extra, so humans soon found they could share some of that milk. Fair enough. I know a fellow who was brought up in India and he tells me that as a child, he remembers the loving eyes of those holy cows. He would literally nap in the fields, cuddled up with the mama cows, who would let him nurse alongside the baby cows.

Diversified small organic farms are in fact the ONLY way to feed all the population of the world, according to a UN study.

But that is a far cry from the horrors of the meat and dairy industry factory farm model that most people use as the main source of their food. We don’t need this. We can have really yummy food without the meat and dairy industry.

Nuts like us can save the world! We need to fix global warming as well as feeding the people, and nuts are the answer. Some say we must design “plants”, factory style plants, to pull carbon out of the air. I do not think we need to build more factories for that! Planting trees locks up carbon. Some say all those trees would take up living space we need to grow food. What if they were nut trees!? 

Money may not always grow on trees, but I assure you, food most certainly does grow on trees. 

Different kinds of nuts grow well all over the world, even without extra water or care. Obviously the factory farm model can be applied to the production of nut crops, in some cases to the detriment of the environment, but you can also grow nuts in backyards, and use native compatible varieties and organic methods that not only do not harm the environment, but actually improve it!

I recently saw an analysis of the global warming/carbon values of different food sources. Meat and dairy were off the charts. Other foods were smaller contributors to the problem. Only nuts, done right of course, actually reversed global warming causes.

Conventional row crops can deplete soils and contaminate the air and water with poison, and even factory farm style organic row crops can cause erosion and other problems. Trees for nuts can be dramatically different from row crops for food. Instead of depleting the soil, trees enrich the soil by sending roots deep, breaking up compacted soil, and bringing up minerals that then end up at the surface.

While row crops of say, soybeans, require clearing forest, exposing soils to drying, increasing the heat on the surface of the land, trees provide shade, cooling the land, helping retain moisture. There is evidence that forests and trees actually “make“ rain by releasing tiny droplets into the air when they need some water!

While row crops raze the land for monocroping, destroying the micro environment that preceded them, trees actually provide habitat for a myriad of creatures, large and small.

Trees clean the air and make oxygen for us to breathe. And we would all rather look at trees we plant, than a factory “plant” with noisy fans sucking in millions of pounds of air to chemically remove carbon, (even if it did actually work).

Above: walnut tree in the park

Best of all, switching to nuts for food gets us out of the ugly business of the enslavement, torture, and murder of our fellow beings, which is harmful not only to them, but is also a moral hazard to any conscientious person.

Let’s all go nuts for nuts!

"Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”   

―   Warren Buffett

Previous posts with recipes for nut milk and other great nutty menu ideas:

How to make nut milk at home:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2014/12/nutmilk.html

Smoothie with time release recipe:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2016/12/planet-earth-mothers-milk-smoothie.html

Converting your favorite recipes:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2015/05/vegan-cuisine-meat-eaters-love.html

Spiced nuts:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2014/12/party-nuts.html

All Tree Pudding: 

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2015/04/rich-rawsome-puddin-downloaded-from.html

"Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. ”   

―   Kahlil Gibran 

Dark Colors

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound; i.e., the interval. – Marshall McLuhan

Bizarrely enough, the smart monkeys of Earth are obsessed with wrapping colorful and non colorful cloth around their bodies and striding around in display rituals. We just love designing and acquiring new pieces of said cloth, taking pictures of it, and us in it, and endlessly parading our clinging cloth pieces.

I write about colors and dyeing in the spring. I am in a soft but clear pastel and cheery mood then, full of hope for harmony and gentleness.

I have experienced a backlash.

I had boxed up my murky colored clothes; now I crack them open again. 

I can’t seem to get enough mucky drabs; I pull out black, dull green, navy and browns. Why, what?

Change of season? Do we really reflect nature by liking flower colors in spring, and preferring dry leaf colors in fall? Do we dance out the colors around us wrapped in flags of the seasons’ colors?

Or is something darker at play? 

Am I depressed about the times we live in, the trends, retrenchments, the dark feelings suddenly coming out from under the rocks?

Like the phenomenon of long skirts in hard times and short skirts in good times, I think we fly happy colorful flags when we feel safe to do so. Am I diving under cover of camo in these times of backlash?

Just wondering.

“Flowers grow out of dark moments.” – Corita Kent

“I used to be afraid until I learned that I am a light and the dark is afraid of me.” -Eph 5:8

Toward Unitics Consciousness

“We are in this lifeboat together and the fiercest thing we can do is to say, I’m living in a new republic of the heart. I’m a revolutionary. You are not going to separate yourself from me. I refuse to be in separation from you. That’s the fierceness. That’s the voice of love.” -Terry Patton 

(From the book, Unitics:)

Politics will always be with us, as long as we have egos. We will struggle, contend, and so, need to compromise as long as we are separate beings. But what if we realize that we are not all that separate? What if we regard our individual selves as also part of a larger whole? What if we regarded others the way parents think of their own children, putting them first, making sure they had everything they need? The saints speak of all people as their children.

Both our sense of individuality and our awareness of the whole are evolving together now, at the same time. The process is mutually reinforcing, with the strong ego longing to become part of something greater, while each member of the greater whole stretches to grow out and beyond the perceived constraints of conventional group mind, thus expanding it.

If your imprisonment to the group consciousness seems to inhibit your freedom, so also can your illusion of an isolated self, you against the world. The feeling of membership to the group may bring feelings of security and belonging, but if you don’t value your own self you may not feel deserving of that love. That is just a different flavor of lonesome.

The paradox of individual self and the All continues all the way up and down. As above, so below. Turtles, all the way down. So politics forever, right?

Not so much. Eventually politics, the struggle between separate entities for power, should mature into a cooperation model that seeks the well being and success of all. Unitics.

Unitics addresses the same needs at a higher level. Individuality is not lost, but it is employed in more interesting and meaningful ways. Nor is connectedness lost, but enhanced, by a feeling of self that expands to the whole group, the whole planet, indeed, to all life everywhere forever.

It is a shift of perspective. Seeing everyone else as your sibling, all creatures as your responsibility, the planet as your community garden, the universe as one with your own body, causes you to feel and act differently.

Just as the political arena is fear filled, so the realm of unitics is love filled. Indeed the thought of oneself as separate and alone in the world is fearful! But so is the way individuals have often been controlled and oppressed by the the group. This is a kind of scary security gained at the price of being subsumed by the majority.

Unitics, by contrast, arises from an inner identification, an new and greater awareness, sparking a spontaneous and natural impulse to contribute. The feeling of security caused by the consciousness of unitics is authentic and loving.

Children live in this paradox. They accept their complete dependence on their parents and tribe as obvious. At the same time they strive and drive themselves toward competence and self sufficiency constantly and unrelentingly. Can we grownups hold this paradox with that much freshness, and never stop developing both a sense of connection as well as individuality?

“Remember, the entrance to the sanctuary is within you” -Rumi

Regardening The Earth

“I pledge allegiance to the world; to care for earth and sea and air; to cherish every living thing; with peace and justice everywhere.”-L.G. (This was officially read out at the United Nations)

How to Regarden the Earth

(from The Flower Child’s Garden Planet)

First, each of us awakens to the holographic two way nature of our connection to the greater Whole.

Next, we reorient and align with loving cooperation and healing.

Regarding the garden, our body and our environment are connected. We are creating one planet Earth garden, even as we each are an individual raised bed. We are each a walking talking universe in a pot, or maybe a doughnut shape.

We consume. We whirl and spew, affecting everything and everyone else. All together we roar, we are a big force on Earth, for good or ill. 

We are starting to awaken and get a clue. We have choices. To make, now. Real, physical, down to earth choices, choices about how to think creatively, and choices about our attitude. Attitude is altitude.

Think of a neighborhood. Each house is a unique space reflecting its dwellers, and together the feeling of the neighborhood as a whole emerges. We are landscaping a whole planet now!

Think of a flock of birds standing together. When do they all take off together, leaping as one into the sky, who decides the moment, and how? The alpha leader birds? No, it happens when enough of them are aligned with one another, each choosing, one by one, to turn to face in the same direction, conveying their shared intent. Each of us birds really, intrinsically, matters. It is time to take a new direction.

Time to replace economy of money as guiding metaphor for societal organization, with planet garden. It’s time to see the living regenerating systems of planet Earth as a guide to the garden we must now to create to survive and thrive.

The big changes we need actually come from gazillions of tiny turnings. You need not make drastic and dramatic gestures. To just go along with your awareness activated, and to do what you can do, with what you have, as you go along, is enough. Reorient and align.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” 

― Albert Einstein