Our misconception that we can acually own something exclusively, can make us greedy for more, miserly in our generosity and fear-ridden that someone is going to be able to take it away from us. Everything we have is a gift from the universe with an innate design for multplying as it's shared.
Keeping your thoughts, ideas, creative notions to yourself is like not watering the garden when the seeds have sprouted. Bring something to the harvest celebration.
image source: flickr
For a recent assignment from a creative women's group I belong to, I was asked to "describe my role as hunter and gatherer of the universe", using art and poetry.
This poem showed up:
I realize that what is gathered
is just a temporary arrangement
of molecules and energy waves.
I only borrow from the universe.
And, I am grateful for the loan.
We attach so strongly to our possessions and our ideas about everything. We want to have the best and be the best and be seen as the best. How we measure up causes so much trouble and grief, meanness and greed, us and them.
Generosity, unconditionally shared, can change everything.
image source: flickr
I remember the Christmas times of my childhood. The colorful Christmas tree set up high in the window, on the round table in my Grandmother's house. It was a houseful of women in those days, my mother had decided to leave my Dad when I was eight and she brought my sister and I home to live in the country near Turlock, California.
I counted and rearranged the presents every night, not because I was greedy but because I loved the magic of the pretty wrapping, and the excitement of the mystery of what they could be, and the generosity from which they sprung. I knew each present by sight, who they were for and who they were from. It was almost sad when they had to be unwrapped.
Now I don't want, or need, a pile of presents. And the tree I love the most is with me every day, a hundred year old (or more) blue oak in the back yard.
And the magic? Yes, I still do long for the magic.
© Elsah Cort, from the Wu Wei Series
The heart is both the giver and the receiver. We need it beyond belief.
© Elsah Cort from the Earth Series
"When you do a personal act, a human act, and change someone else for the better, then you’re an artist," Seth Godin. Read a short treatise (an addendum to his book Linchpin) at the pdf file link on Seth's blog.
We all have rushed by the invisible persons that keep our human society functioning. Some of them work right beside us, some are cleaning up after us, and some are even in our families. Some times we feel that we are the invisible person that no one really recognizes or even wants to know.
Martín Prechtel (Native American healer, author and teacher) teaches a beautiful ritual in his moving workshops. He asks that you bring three small gifts. During the workshop you interact with a partner. At the end of the time together, you give one of your gifts to this person. You also give them the other two gifts, with the instructions for them to give one of the gifts to an "invisible" person that they come across in their daily life. You are to also give them the second gift and ask them to notice another invisible person and share the third gift. It can become a profound paying it forward.
You don't need little wrapped gifts to practice this potent service. Saying hello, and meaning it, can become a change agent for person's life. It can change the world itself.
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Also posted on The Deeper Well blog,
where you can find details about the burnout retreats.
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