The Shelter of Trees

(from The Flower Child’s Garden Planet:)

In one day last July, the people of one country, Ethiopia, planted three hundred and fifty million trees. 

That’s a good start. We need a lot more. The great forests of long ago were decimated by humans in their development of farming and agrarian civilizations.

Now we need them to come back. This time it will be part of our new age of the garden planet. This time when the great forests return, we will bring them back consciously, deliberately, and lovingly. All those trees are needed to protect our planet from overheating, to purify the air from our pollution as we learn to survive without leaving toxic waste in our wake, and to fill our garden planet with beauty and fruit. 

Lately, I am particularly concerned about the electronic pollution our devices and transmission towers are emitting. These unstudied emissions may be confusing bugs, the bottom of the food chain for our beloved bird friends, and causing a crash in populations of all kinds of insects, butterflies, and bees. 

This pollution may have unstudied bad effects on our bodies, cells, and brains. We are now subject to these vibrations which we have not evolved with as a species, from which we have little protection and no cultural knowledge or experience.

Personally, we can get grounded electrically using the grounding systems in our modern houses, and by going barefoot. And yes, by hugging a tree! 

As I sit here writing, I am resonating with, and connecting with the electrical field of my planet (instead of the fields around my device, local radio and cell towers) by leaning on a pillow I made from conductive cloth,  alligator clipped to a plug, connected to the grounding wire in the house by means of an ordinary wire plugged in to the wall outlet. 

Grounding is one strategy, shielding is another, but I’m skeptical of that one because it seems impossible to fully shield anything with so many sources of so many kinds of radiation all around us now. As a civilization we should stop transmitting through the air and use fiber optic instead. 

But one thing I recently became aware of is the electromagnetic protective power of trees. The forest in which I live actually softens and partially ameliorates these jangly aberrant frequencies as well. There are many reasons why it feels good to walk in the forest. This is one more.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

- John Muir

Want is your favorite color today?

“Life is about using the whole box of crayons”- Ru Paul

Why limit your favorite color to just one, forever? What is your mood today? In the industrialized world, you can choose the color you will wrap your body in each day, so why not check in with your feelings right now? 

You may have been taught that your emotions are wild and unruly, and must be controlled and suppressed. This is not always so. Surely you want to avoid loosing your temper and dumping on other people. 

But feelings are also a very important guide to what you need to pay attention to. That “gut” feeling can protect you if you know how to listen and respond to it.

“Mere color can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways”- Oscar Wilde

Feeling and desire are powered by love at the root. This Love is what makes the world go around, as they say. Feeling-desire is the motivation power that drives relationships, creative endeavors of all kinds, and is the moving force behind all conceived actions.

And color perception is deeply involved with our feelings. The colors that you surround yourself with, as clothing or in your chosen home or work environment do influence you, for the better or worse. 

Have you ever had the experience of looking in the full closet and finding nothing you want to wear? Often, it’s because you don’t have clothes in the colors you are resonating with in there. 

Relax. There is really no wrong way to wear color nowadays. 

Forget the rules you may have been taught. 

Go by how the colors feel to you and it will be fine. 

Be playful!

Of course, if you are trying to communicate something about yourself to others, you may decide to use the colors you wear in that way. Dark, dignified, and professional, for example. Bright, neon, and noticeable. Light and fresh. Blending in blue. And so on.

Bringing awareness to your feelings about the colors in your life brings, well, color into it. 

Also, if you do not, you will still be affected by it on an unconscious level. The many ads we are bombarded with on an hourly basis in the modern world are created by people who assuredly know very well how to manipulate you with color.

Rainbow Salad

Remember color in the food you eat too! Brightly colored whole foods, the fruits and vegetables, are sure to be good for you. I have been know to cruise the produce section of the natural food store and buy one of every red thing that day, and bring them home and cook them, just for the fun of it. Or yellow. Or orange. Or purple. Want blue? Steam some purple cabbage with some white potatoes; the spuds will stain blue. How about blue for your rainbow salad? Pick the edible blue flowers of the easy to grow borage plants in your garden.

So why not wake up right now and look at the flowers?

I wonder which color, which I was not fond of earlier, will start to enchant me next...

“I prefer living in color”- David Hockney

Color Spill (a story)

Once upon a time, all of the pots of light just sat there. 

Arranged in neat rows, they just sat there. 

Nothing ever happened. 

Long ago, so long ago that no one could remember, the real sky had been domed over. 

It was always dark.

One day, one of the pots of light decided to do something. 

It tipped over! 

The beautiful colors of the light began to spill out! 

The other pots of light looked on, and then they started to shine and spill out too.

Suddenly the false dome of the sky crashed open, revealing the real sky, which was full of stars. 

A swarm of artists color palettes flew in through the new hole in the sky dome, attracted to the beautiful colors of the light.

Now, everyone realized that we all have these beautiful colors.

And from that day on, nothing was ever the same again.

I wonder what we will make with our colors?

(Illustrations by my sketches and weavings)