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How does your garden grow?

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Dear friends, Since I am taking a week off, I’ve chosen an encore post to share with you today.  Blessings, –Betty

As you live, you sow seeds that will root and grow long after your spirit has left your body. You are the master gardener of your life! You get to decide what to cultivate and what to weed out and throw on the compost pile.

Humans like you put out seeds through ideas, thoughts, words, actions, your vibrations and the tone of your feelings. Do you sow seeds of connection or division? Fear or love? Empowerment for others, or control of others? Do you sow seeds of indifference or passion? You get to choose!

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Jack-in-the-pulpit berries

When you think and send loving thoughts, you plant a seed. When you smile at another person, you plant a seed. When you put others down, you plant a seed. When you blame others you plant a seed.

When you denigrate yourself, you plant a seed. When you allow yourself to be less than you know you can be, you plant a seed.

Now I ask you: How does your garden grow? Is your garden one of fear, self doubt, dis-empowerment? Or is your garden seeded with peace, calm, confidence, love affirmation for yourself and others?

What legacy to you wish to leave your loved ones and the others who inhabit and inherit this planet? The seeds you plant today will make a difference for years to come! You get to choose!

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Silver Maple seeds

Begin your garden planning now. If you’ve grown crops that felt thorny and inedible in the past, you get to start over. Think about what you want to grow. Look at the old weeds and unwanted seedlings with love as you weed them. Let them fuel your compost pile and fertilize new growth!

Plant only those seeds that lift you up! Tend your garden with loving care, and your harvest will delight and inspire you and future generations!

Abundance is a state of mind

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Dear friends, I am taking a week off.  I hope this encore post resonates with you.  Happy Thanksgiving! –Betty

Abundance is not just money, coins and dollar bills, It is the world around you – the beauty around you, the people in your life, the land that supports you, the air you breathe, the water that gives you sustenance, the flow of energy through your life.

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Autumn crab apples

Abundance is in nature that surrounds and supports you and gives so freely and generously of her harvests and resources. It is the human made world of clothing and shelter, streets and roads, libraries, hospitals, places of safety and community. Abundance is the inspired offerings of art, music dance, theater, books, movies, writings, design and building, comedy and laughter – all manner of human creations.

Abundance is in the priceless laughter that bubbles up inside you and feeds your spirit! It is the sunlight bringing life to all things. Abundance is the tools, materials, and ideas to create and bring your inspirations to life.

Abundance is the freedom and time to enjoy the changing of the seasons, the gorgeous colors of fall – to take a few moments to watch the golden leaves float and spin and dance as they fall to Earth so they will feed the soil that supports your life.

Abundance is the food and drink on your table, day after day, year after year, nourishing and sustaining your body and soul. It is the loving friends, the helpful strangers, the kind neighbors that touch your heart and help you. It is the purring cats and snuggling dogs that share your life and bring your joy and companionship. Abundance is warm socks and boots on a cold day.

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Painted lady butterfly on red zinnia

Most of all, abundance is in the feelings that flow through you – joy, inspiration, inner calm, soul satisfaction, contentment, happiness…  Even feelings of anger and fear are there for your information and learning, to help you know yourself and learn from life.

Abundance is the feeling of being blessed to overflowing! It is the ability to share the overflow of your blessings with others.

With appreciation, name your blessings and feel the feelings they awaken in you .  Make this your daily practice.

When you feel confident and secure enough to be generous with your blessings, no matter how much money you do or do not have, you are truly living a life of abundance and plenty!

Ask the spirits for help

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Does the prospect of change, even a small shift toward the light feel challenging, as though you must move a boulder off your chest, a ton of bricks from your back, extricate yourself from quicksand that is sucking you under?

You can ask for spiritual assistance, guidance, and help with problems and challenges in your life that seem insurmountable. When you ask from a place of self honesty, surrender and trust, you will receive answers and assistance.

Painted lady butterfly on red zinnia

The answers and assistance from spirit may come in many forms. You may see a sign in nature, such as an amazing spider web, a colorful bird in flight, a full moon surrounded by colored light… You may receive spiritual wisdom and assistance through your senses, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell as well as simply knowing the truth in your heart and mind.

Your challenge is to discern the true and helpful spirit given messages from other random thoughts or ideas in your head.

Loving spirits will never ask you to harm another living being or the environment or send hateful messages or energy to another. Loving spirits will never ask you to harm yourself, put yourself at risk, or keep yourself small.

True spirit messages will give you a feeling of energy and possibilities and purpose. Spirit messages will resonate with your wise self and in your heart.

When you carry out loving spiritual advice your actions will enhance and reweave the web of your life and all life with energetic threads of love and renewal.

Robin in winter

We loving compassionate spirits are all around, supporting you, waiting for your awareness and awakening to our presence and our support for you.

Please ask for our help, receive our communication in whatever form it comes to you, then do your best to carry out the loving and compassionate advice you receive.

Trust what you receive from the compassionate spirits, and more will be given to you.

The waters speak

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We, the various waters of the Earth, journey effortlessly across and through the land, finally reaching the great water where we gather together as one water.

From billions of tiny raindrops, thousands of streams lakes and rivers we flow downstream and merge into oneness – the global ocean.

We must flow and find our level, seeking the effortless path, carving the landscapes gullies, canyons, wide river valleys, woodland streams, prairie pot holes, wetlands, huge deep lakes on our journey to the great oneness.

We come together in the great oceans and seas, heaving and swelling, rippling or calm. Life giving. Life affirming. All our tiny drops melding into one mighty water. Then we separate again, as billions of our droplets evaporate and merge effortlessly with the air.

As water vapor we gather to create clouds, fall as rain, sleet snow, or hail and begin our long journey once again to the gathering place of all waters.

We begin our journey once again as we fall to Earth, gathering with other waters, becoming stronger and more powerful as we increase in volume.

We make our way downstream, meandering and slow or rushing in flood, blessing your Earth with the gift of life as we flow through and shape your varied landscapes.

Finally we reach our mother waters and pour into her. We cannot flow back upstream, or undo our transformation to salt water as we reach our destination.

We are the sacred waters of the Earth. We are the stuff of life.

Do you live by the clock?

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What strange ideas you humans choose to rule your lives. For example, the group-think/ hypnosis of the clock; turning it backward or forward an hour twice a year, pretending it won’t affect your body, mind and spirit.

Those in charge make ridiculous rules regarding clocks that do not factor in your true nature, your needs for consistent patterns and rhythms to life, your body’s need to respond to light and dark.

The clock at first was a human created tool and method for dividing time into segments. Now is is a way to control your seconds, moments, your hours and days when you eat, work sleep…

Alarming clock

You must realize that your bodies are intricate systems designed to respond effortlessly to light and dark and every nuance in between. You begin to stir and wake as the sun rises, increase your activity as the light fills the sky, you grow sleepy at dusk, then sleep deeply during the dark hours of night.

Your body’s internal light sensors are closely attuned to the brightness of the sky, the seasons, the turning of the year.

These silly rules of time keeping invented by someone without your best interest at heart would override thousands of centuries of living by the sun, your natural body clock. You would give this up and allow the ticking little mechanism that measures out the minutes to keep you corralled and domesticated.

Humans have allowed those in charge to turn the population away from their true nature as children of the sun and moon, light and dark, attuned to the seasons, trusting the body, living in harmony with the larger patterns and rhythms of the earth, or our solar system, our moon and the stars.

All I ask is why?

Perhaps the clock can be a kind of helpful tool in your life as you trust your body to master time, light and dark. Allow the clock to serve you, not the reverse.

The river speaks

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I am ceaseless and timeless. I flowed past the camps of your ancestors in ancient times, and I flow now under the concrete and steel bridges of your streets and highways, between fields of corn and beans. I flow past the towns and factories through forests and wetlands.

Life flows endlessly here- always the same, always new and fresh.

I may change course over time, undercut and topple the tallest trees, cut through solid stone, shape and carve the landscape.

I carry much that you choose to discard, your pollution and garbage. It becomes part of me. Is this what you want?

I rise and flood in spring, after the long winter freeze, swelling and spreading expanding beyond my banks. I pick up speed and power.

Do not argue with a flooded river!

My ripples respond to the most delicate vibrations of wind and weather and light and water currents, to rumblings in the earth, the movements of the stars.

The sun reflects and creates sparkles and dancing bands of light in my depths. You might sit near me and meditate on my hypnotizing moving light and water show. Find peace here.

Sunlit ripples on shallow water

I provide a home for the water dwellers, the fish of all descriptions, crustaceans, insects, the tadpoles and frogs, turtles, food for the fur-bearers and birds, a place of thirst quenching for all.

I grind and polish rough stones to smooth. I grind and polish smooth stones to sand. I compress sand into sandstone. Do not ask me how or why. It is in my nature to do so.

I run under the open sky at night, only the stars and moon lighting me in the uninhabited places. I move under the earth in complete darkness, carving the structure of this planet into caves of great complexity and beauty.

I am the river of life that flows through your ancient memory into your present and on toward the future.

It is my purpose to collect the waters of the earth and channel them effortlessly, to cleanse and shape the earth, to reach oneness with the great waters at the end of my journey… which is only the beginning.

Clear the clutter!

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Are you cluttered energetically? This might feel like heaviness around your heart or gut, dullness or fuzziness of the mind, sluggishness, a deadening of the emotions.

You might feel lethargic. You might feel as though you are not making progress in life, that you are stuck, spinning your wheels.

Energetic clutter can consist of emotions that you do not want to feel or acknowledge, thoughts that reel around and around in your mind with no end, a sense of disconnection from body or spirit.

Dear ones, I am here to tell you you can find healing as you work to clear the energetic debris that has built up in your energy atmosphere over your lifetime.

If you are not feeling well, please ask your Doctor to check for physical illnesses – take care of that first. Then if you feel the need of more help with overwhelming emotions as you begin to clear the clutter of heart and mind, please seek out the help of a therapist or healer.

You can clear the accumulated clutter of a lifetime and let the energy of your life flow more smoothly and easily. Start small just as you might start decluttering a single drawer or closet in your home. Build on your success.

Let yourself feel these emotions that have been cluttering your precious moments and little by little you will heal and your life will become a more joyful and peaceful experience.

The world needs you clear and focused, healthy and strong, sharing your gifts, allowing your light to shine as brightly as possible.

Web of creation

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When life feels bleak and wintry, when your spark is extinguished your light clouded over, can you find in the innermost part of yourself the quiet voice that asks you to “trust”?

Your higher self asks you to trust that you are supported by the web of life, to trust that there is a wisdom larger than you can imagine that hears your longings, knows your heart, that weaves all possibilities and prayers into the great tapestry of life on this planet.

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The web of life creates the fabric of your experiences from the raw material of your thoughts your expressions of language emotion and art, your actions, your beliefs.

This is the language of creation! This is how you ask for what you desire!

So learn to trust life. Learn to channel your thoughts, words, creations, feelings, and beliefs to reflect the life you desire.

Even when times feel tough, remember that you can learn to see your life from a higher perspective, see the larger reality, the big patterns. Knowing this, you can learn to shift these patterns into alignment with your deepest purpose.

Colored maple leaves

The web of life has your back. It supports and creates the life you are asking for, building it with the energy of your thoughts, words and actions.

Grow to the light

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Tree grow tall to the sun, our source of energy and we root deeply to the earth, our home base, our ground of existence.

We may grow in a group together, but we do not lean to the right to the left to help another smaller tree to more light.

Community of cottonwoods

We do not weaken ourselves to help others grow. We are strong together, each taking our place in the light. When a mature tree dies the young saplings crowding underneath will shoot up quickly into the sunlight, finally finding their own place in the canopy.

Be like a tree. Do not weaken yourself or sacrifice your energy and power or hold yourself back because another adult is weaker, has less energy, is farther behind than you.

Of course you will help and protect and love your children. Human children need more care, attention and togetherness than cottonwood seedlings.

Grandmother Cottonwood

If you want to, show them where their power lies. Reflect their strengths to them, let them access the source of power within themselves

Weakening yourself to help other grown people never works because the others do not know what to do with your energy, your power, your knowledge. They will squander your gifts while draining you. For nothing!

They will either learn to access their own power and stand on their own feet or they will not. If they do not, please bless them on their life’s path and let go of your misplaced responsibility

Your job is to grow to the light and spread your branches!

True purpose

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You are here now. You are in this place, at this time, inhabiting your particular body.

Since this is so, there are certain unalterable facts governing your existence. You must breathe fresh clean air to survive. You must eat Earth-grown plant and perhaps animal products to maintain your body, your physical energy and stamina. You must drink fresh water to maintain your energetic and physical health.

Indigo bunting

Do you ever stop and wonder why you exist here and now? (Hint: Only humans do this!)

Animals, trees, grasses, all plant life, algae, fishes, insects, amphibians, reptiles, stones, stars and moons, all creation, and all created things simply exist within the parameters of their form and function. They do not spend time and energy wondering why they exist or what their larger purpose is.

The fact is, you exist as body, as spirit. You came to this planet in human form. You are energetically rooted to Earth energy. Your awareness is centered in your heart and body. Your spirit is housed in your body and connected to source energy. (Some call it heavenly energy.)

You are anchored here, between heaven and earth, supported and given all you need to thrive in your life.

Given that you are alive, that you have your fundamental needs met, you may begin to wonder why you are here. You may begin to seek a deeper meaning in your life, to seek your reasons for being.

Grandmother Cottonwood

Some know it from early childhood. They know what they are called to do and be. Others must seek and find, maybe spending much time in the process, uncovering little by little, slowly making their way toward the light and passion of their purpose.

Let yourself be drawn like a magnet toward those activities, those people, those experiences that light you up and bring you joy, that flood your heart with satisfaction.

Navigate through life by your feelings and callings of your spirit. Let them teach you and guide you toward your true purpose