Uncover

A few days ago a friend showed up to let me know she was doing okay, and gave me a new number to be able to reach her.  After a major crisis, she and her family had moved a few weeks ago, so I was happy to see her at my door, and glad to hear things were going much better for her.  We stood on the porch, and before leaving she said, "Wow, your plants look beautiful!  You have a green thumb."  I've never thought of myself having that gift, and told her it was nothing more than caring for them.  She raised a brow at me and said, "You forget.  I saw those plants before you touched them."  I just shrugged and laughed.  Yet after she left I looked at those plants again from her point of view, and realized that they were indeed thriving, and expressing themselves with a deep rich green.

When I first got here to this house, my mother's house, all the plants looked dead.  Yet the closer I looked I saw hints of green under all the dead stuff, and knew that with care these plants could thrive once again.  I got busy cutting away the dead stuff, knowing that some plants will use all their resources to try to bring the dead part back to life, virtually killing themselves eventually if the dead part isn't cut away.  Pruning helps insure new growth, abundance.

As I trimmed away the dead I told each plant how beautiful it was, and thanked it for being here, for sharing itself to add to the beauty of this porch.  I told them all I was glad they were here.  My eyes only saw the beauty of their being that was still alive in glorious expression.  I knew their potential, and saw in them the trueness of their nature.  Being plants, of course, they never once questioned or doubted what I gave and saw in them.  I like to believe they were just thankful someone came along to help them express their true natures in all their fabulousness. :)  I know I am grateful for what they give.

Humans, on the other hand, and unfortunately, question and doubt the beauty another may see within them.  I have encountered folks who will argue outright against the good I see there in their heart and soul...the only thing that is true in them.  I saw one man's eyes suddenly grow cold and hard when I thanked him for a kindness he gave to me, and then he said, "You don't know me," and I watched him erect a wall between us in spirit, and he walked away.  I almost said to him, "Well, I would say it is you who does not know you."  But I left it alone and let him defend his right to his bad self.  I have encountered this kind of thing over and over.  Even those who think they are being self effacing are believing somewhere inside them that it is not a good thing to let their light shine.  Humility is practiced and found through a grateful heart, not in covering the light of our glorious expression.

A year ago my mother had a stroke, and during her time in the hospital I cleaned up her room.  It had not been cleaned for a long time, and things had piled up in it, and she wouldn't let anyone in to help her, even though the offer was given many, many times.  As I cleared things out of her room and cleaned, I began noticing something being uncovered.  What was revealed under all the stuff was my mother's natural love for beauty, magic, and the Native American.  I found myself slowing down, and almost moving in a sacred way, gently uncovering something already in existence under all the "dead stuff."  I realized that what was within my mother, what I had always seen there, and she had adamantly argued against, was still very much alive, being expressed in her room.  I felt she had lost sight of it a very long time ago, and I hoped she'd be reminded of it again when she came home and saw her room uncovered.  She told me once, after she returned home, that she'd sit quietly in there looking around at her room.  Sadly, the habit of covering up her light, and believing her reasons for it, had her arguing against it again.  Like that man, she fixes her gaze on her "bad self," whatever that is, and so it becomes an argument thereafter which, frankly, I don't wish to get into.  Most of the time I remain silent. 

I do understand it is a challenge to even see that it is we who are covering ourselves up.  I didn't realize the extent to which I had myself covered until some gentle souls began entering my life and peeked under the blanket to say hello, and asked me to come out and play and express...and believe in what they saw in me.  I know my friends, Mikki and Krista especially, desired to bonk my head with a two by four if that is what it would take to get me to come out from under my thick blanket.  I didn't see, my friends, but I see now. :)

And now that I see ... I think I will make like those plants I love so much and not question or doubt the beauty others see in me, and believe that I am an addition to the Porch of the World, and what I have to give is good, and that they are glad I am with them.  Here.  I suppose I have been a bud long enough, and now it is truly my season to bloom...better late than never :).

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