Connecting in a Garden of Love and Unity

Connecting in a Garden of Love and Unity

I am preparing a garden of love……smiling. With my right hand I planted the flowers, and this right hand got poked by a thorn, actually it cut and ripped the skin. My left hand came to the rescue with bathing, ointment and a bandage. How automatically that all occurred without my thinking mind involved.

I am but a mere witness to this act of kindness from my left hand….smiling. My right hand lights the candles, writes books, and does its own daily routine. But my right hand doesn’t seem to be proud of it. It doesn’t look down on the left hand to say, “Oh left hand, you are good for nothing — I’ve done it all. You are useless. You are good for nothing.” The right hand has never suffered from the complex of pride. The left hand has never suffered from the complex of unworthiness. It’s wonderful how the human body loves itself if we only but pay witness.

When the right hand has a problem, or gets wounded or injured, the left hand comes right away. The right hand never says, “You have to pay me back. I always come to help you. You owe me.”
When we can see all others as our own hands; not separate from us, not better or worse or even equal to us, then we have the wisdom of nondiscrimination and unity. We see the happiness of others as our happiness. Their suffering is our suffering.

So there must be some expression of love within the body for all the other parts of the body. Sometimes my hands help each other, sometimes they each act separately, but my hands have never fought each other.

We live in a holographic universe….what lives within me is also true for all that exists beyond the body. All there is on this earthly plane is interconnected just as this metaphor. The trees, the earth, the rocks, the waters, the sky, the sun and moon….all things are connected including all others.

All things named have a form and we gave the form names with our language. However form is simply a phenomenon in time…objectively the movements of atoms within a “void formless” being we call us. We experience everything through our perceptions, feelings, thoughts, energy and information…all from the origin of the formlessness of space time energy.

I have a few gardens of love, we all do; our own garden and that of our beloved and that of our world. First, we tend and take care of our own garden as a way to practice and learn the art of gardening. Within our own individual gardens there are beautiful flowers and there are also stones, twigs and rubbish. This might reveal itself as anger, fear, discrimination, and jealousy within us. We have a choice to water the rubbish and nurture the negative seeds or to water the flowers of compassion, understanding, and love, whereby we will strengthen the positive seeds. What our garden of love shows up as, is what is being watered and fertilized within us.

Practicing this selective watering and by cultivating our own garden as well, gives us the wisdom to help water the flowers in the garden of our beloved, others and all that is. When we have succeeded with our self, with our beloved, and all others there is mutual understanding between us. When this mutual understanding and communication is good, joy and happiness and peace will be the foundation/soil of the garden.

Our goal in practicing mindfulness and the deepest gift it can bring us is the wisdom of nondiscrimination and the connection to the all. We are not noble by birth. We are noble only by virtue of the way we think, speak, and act. The person who practices mindfulness has the wisdom of nondiscrimination and understands our connectivity to all and it informs all actions between self and others and between all that is. This person’s heart has grown large and this true love and unity knows no obstacles.

May we come to understand that all is connected and in relationship with the all that is. May we become like our own left hands, reaching out to others to create the most beautiful gardens of love, and may these gardens expand and grow to encompass all others and the world around us.

Love and light, Christina