Granny Annie’s Garden

 Was this the best Christmas present ever? It was high on the list of nourishing gifts. Our son gave us a box of ferns from the ‘Rocklea Fern Man’, who sells excellent little plants at a good price. It was a delightful collection of many and varied ferns, fifty tiny seedlings in very small black growing tubes, each seedling in beautiful condition, ready for planting out when the weather was damp and inviting for them. Some are ferns that remain tiny, others will grow into huge tree ferns; there are dark green feathery ferns, and others with broad, variegated leaves. Such variety there is in the collection.

At the entrance gate to our property there’s a steep bank, a bank that’s been covered for years with weeds to hold it together. It’s not a garden that welcomes you and  invites you into our sanctuary, just a pragmatic place that ensures that the bank doesn’t erode and fall onto the driveway.

Since Christmas I have spent a few hours weeding the bank and planting the ferns. As I’ve planted, I’ve been dedicating the area to Granny Annie. My Grandmother Annie died before I was born, having lived a life that was filled with her dark attitudes of pain and struggle, interspersed with her loving personality that apparently shone through at times. Her life ended with more pain and struggle, leaving a residue of that despairing attitude spread around the family. Even after her death, that heavy life dominated the female line.

Now Granny Annie’s garden is growing to bring light, life and love to all who find life hard, those who feel trapped and powerless, those for whom the despair is too great a burden. As I’ve planted each little fern, I’ve been offering love and light to dark places, dark souls.

Shine on, little ferns, continue to give light to the world. Invite people into our place… and hold that bank together while you’re shining.

Oysters and Pearls
I’ve just returned from Broome, on the NW coast of Western Australia. For over a century, Broome has been a township based on the pearling industry. It’s still partially sustained by pearling, as a tourist curiosity, these days.
This had me thinking about pearls and the way they are formed. Natural pearls developed in oyster shells when a tiny grain of sand or grit entered the shell. The sand irritated the oyster, which reacted by secreting a nacre to coat the foreign object. Gradually the nacre coated the grain of sand over until there was no irritation, just a beautiful, lustrous round object that we know as a pearl. Cultured pearls are formed in the same way, but in oyster shells that are farmed; the sand is introduced deliberately into the oyster, again resulting in a pearl.
This is probably a bit trite, but there’s a wonderful comparison between the formation of pearls and the ways in which we deal with life.
When we have an irritant, we develop ways to deal with it, sometimes healthy ways, sometimes not so helpful.
These irritants can come in many forms, perhaps as many forms as there are people on earth. Some people are dealing with extreme circumstances like homelessness, deep grief, permanent physical incapacity or a chronic despair. Others have less severe but still demanding irritants: a difficult family member, a recurring emotional distress, a physical condition that ails, a career that isn’t going too well, or a lack of joy in life.
Yet when we look deeply into these situations, conditions and circumstances, there is usually a pearl to be found.
It’s often very hard to find the advantage to any difficult situation. Perhaps we can find, not the advantage, but the thoughts that have created and perpetuated the situation. For thoughts are always behind every situation in our lives… it’s a fundamental law of life that thought creates what is.

Integrity; it’s such an ephemeral state in my life, even if I like to think otherwise.
Lately a few people have shown up in my life promising to do something, but never getting around to doing it. I could make them wrong, decide they are no-hopers and move on. Or I could look at my own life and see why lack of integrity has shown up around me.
Lack of integrity can’t appear without me calling it, inviting it in. I must have my metaphoric velcro out for its velcro counterpart to latch on to. I cannot have an energy stream of lack of integrity show up from someone else without already having that energy stream present around me. I am source of my world, so if something comes into my life, I have called it somehow.
So what’s the source of people showing up who do not do what they say they’ll do?
I think of myself as a person of integrity. Perhaps everyone thinks of themselves the same way.  For me, integrity is being who I say I am. Having integrity means that when I give my word, I keep it. Having integrity means that when I have an image of myself, my possessions, my relationships in a particular state, I match the reality to the image I have created. When I set my mind to do something, I do that thing. I be who I say I be, especially when I just say it to myself and no-one else knows. That’s when my word to myself; matters most, in the dark corners where there is no-one watching.
But if someone has shown up in my life without integrity, it’s time to start searching for where my integrity is out, to bring myself back to the condition in which I want to exist.
Well, as a result of the searching, I’ve had a host of self-revelations, and not particularly pleasant ones at that. There’s also been a flurry of activity in my life. I’ve thanked people for things they’ve done for me, I’ve had conversations to complete issues. Cars have been cleaned inside and out, emails answered, small jobs finished off. And the more I search for the sources of incompletion and lack of integrity in my life, the more show up. 
So I still want to have conversations with people in my life to complete issues, still need to finish the jobs on the desk, still think I will be more careful with every word I speak. Not that there’s a problem if I don’t do all this. It’s just that if I do, my life will flow more readily.
It’s a bit frustrating really to have a list of more things to do, especially when life feels full already, but it also feels powerful to be able to do it.
When my integrity is back in pristine condition, the energy around me feels sparkling, shimmering with promise, ready for creation to occur. It’s worth the effort to get to that result, even if I feel a bit overwhelmed by it all at present.