Human creation

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A human creation

A human creation

Grandmother Cottonwood speaks of human creation. You humans seem obsessed with constant creating. Do you have to meet the mark, prove yourselves, justify your existence? Or do you allow the expression of who you are to flow easily from your heart through the tips of your delightful fingers? This is the highest feeling. Your auras sparkle and dazzle with clear pure rainbow hues when you are in the flow.

Do you strive for perfection, force things to happen on a deadline, or does life simply flow through you? Does life sing through you – through your beautiful voices that express so much even without words? Do you assign levels of goodness or badness to things? In short, are your big brains that worry and think too much holding you back?

Do you always try to be good, or do good? Stop it now! For you were born good, You were good before you were conceived. Even before that when you were spirit, pure energy, you were an expression of the fullness of all that is. You need not do, be, create, or have anything to prove your goodness. For goodness and worthiness are conditions of the web of all things of which you are an integral part. Striving for what you already possess wastes your precious sunlight hours, your time in this body you now find yourself inhabiting!

Give yourself a permission slip to let your words, your creations the music in you to flow without judgment. I delight in the easy flow of all things human. Through the filters of your hearts, spirits and bodies you create your magnificent holy lives.

GCW’s life story

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Grandmother Cottonwood

Grandmother Cottonwood

Grandmother Cottonwood speaks of her life as a tree.

The creek was much closer to my chosen place so long ago when what I knew was to fly on the breeze. I began as a tiny windblown seed that was carried to this precise place at the right time for my beginnings. All that a seed needed was here. Abundant rain, deep soil, the daily wheel of the sun blessing my growing with warmth and light. My seed knew it was home.

The unfolding of life began within my tiny seed before there were outward signs- silent unseen stirrings! (Life will not be denied or suppressed. It must have its way.) Roots being pulled as if by a magnet, uncoiling from deep within the blueprint of being that has served my magnificent ancestors for millennia. Then the great unfolding toward the light, always pulled toward the light, stretching between my two poles, the sun, giver of light above and the deep sustenance of the earthy soil below.

Each year after the season of rest, I grew taller, firmer, sturdier in my roots, broader, my woody bark growing denser and thicker. I began life with two tender leaves, and now I have countless leaves upon my crown each shaped like your symbol for the heart. See how much I love this life!!

Many creatures gathered around me as the years increased. Barred owl, dragonfly, squirrel, deer, vulture, field-mouse, tree-frog, all manner of songbirds and insects, spider, grasses, mullein, milkweed, willow, cockle-burr, thistle, violets, black-eyed susan, sycamore, oak, thorny locust. We are a community of life, our energies and forms interwoven with the ebb and flow of sunshine, shadow, moonlight, starshine, sudden driving rains, glorious heavenly blue skies. We feed each other, we shelter and sustain our web in this magnificent dance you call life.

I delight in my place here in this web of infinite beauty. I am one with all things.

Beingness

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Grandmother Cottonwood, summer moss

Grandmother Cottonwood, summer moss

 

Grandmother Cottonwood speaks of being.

For a tree, being is life.  All that occurs unfolds in the proper timing and season with no effort, no pushing no trying, no struggle.  My beingness is tuned intimately to the web of all things. The tiniest flicker of a spider’s leg as it spins it web, the insect eggs laid on my leaves waiting for their beingness to unfold are all know to me. I delight in my tree-ness!  The leaves of my crown shimmer with joy and I revel in this indescribable beauty!  Shifting patterns of dark and light flicker on my trunk and the earth at my rooty feet.  The shimmer of a cottonwood leaf sets the web of life singing!

Have you tuned in to the beingness that is your deepest self? Beneath the surface trappings, below the energy of thought, deep within your core, at your heartwood, lies the essence of you. You are this from lifetime to lifetime, beyond all measurement, beyond all death and decay. Nothing can alter your beingness!

Take a moment each day to feel and know this invisible indestructible, magnificent, infinite beingness, the foundation and roots of who you are in this lifetime! Let your leaves shimmer with joy!

Knowledge for the planet

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Toad

Toad

Bee of Ames Iowa asks:

Q. What is the greatest piece of knowledge you wish every person on our planet to know?

A.  To know with your hearts (not your heads – for they are overrated!) that you are blessed!  To know in every cell of your body that life is good!  To know with every particle of your being that you belong here!

You are the whole and part of the whole. You are the hub of the great web in which all things are one, and you are the filaments of the web.  You are directly involved in the exhilarating waves of joy, of feeling, of creation, ebbing and flowing throughout this finely tuned universe.

Every living thing has made a difference simply by choosing to come to earth in this lifetime; as a tree, rooting deeply to the earth, bringing up fruit and seeds from the elements of sunshine and rain and soil; as a bird soaring on the breeze and launching a clear sweet song into the silence; as a human, following your deepest passions, creating from the deepest core of your being; as a drop of water merging with the flow of the creek, as a blade of grass, turning toward the sun, as a toad silently watching for a tasty morsel, as a handful of silty soil on a creek-bank; as a stone patiently soaking up the heat of each day and releasing it at night.

Every particle of creation here upon the earth is good – everything is whole within itself and part of a larger whole.

You are meant to be here now! Allow yourselves to blossom into the fullness of your inborn potential and see how the web of all things responds to your being!

Joy!

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Pure joy!

Pure joy!

GCW speaks of joy:

You humans with your two strong legs, your powerful voices, your beating hearts, your exquisite hands, arms, elbows, shoulders, your graceful flowing movements, your smooth supple skin a tree like me can only dream of… your language, your nuance of tone and inflection, your impossibly beautiful music – You are magnificent creatures!

I see your beautiful energies interweave, intermingle, create new patterns and colors as you come together- even two strangers meeting on the path beneath my branches create fascinating never-been seen-before patterns of energy (and you think they didn’t even notice you).

All is energy. When it flows freely you feel joy; you become joy – you are lit up like the night sky studded with countless stars and a full moon, you are deep and infinite. You feel expansive as though you are one with all things, (and you are) and this feeling expands through your body moving every cell of your being to dance, to sing, to create effortlessly in the way most suited to your individual natures.

When you hold yourself apart from this flow, it is like beaching yourself on a sandbar, or to become a stone submerged deep at the bottom of a stream bed. But everything in this oneness affects everything else and the current will rise in flood and sweep the sandbar clean, or wear away the stone, releasing each particle again to dance upon the current of life in the endless cycle of creation and re-creation.

Let your energies sing as they are meat to! You are a vital part of all that is. You are meant to shine brightly and freely. It is time to cast off the clouds that dim your light and reach toward the sun! Your light is an integral part of this oneness we call life.

Do you feel trapped?

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Amazing roots

Amazing roots

K of Omaha, NE wonders

Q. Do you ever feel like you’re trapped because you are rooted to the ground?

A. I have chosen this life as a tree. Being rooted, sending my roots effortlessly toward the center of our magnificent mother, the earth, is simply who I am. I would not trade my rootedness, my anchor, my stability, my station in this life for anything.

This particular place where I am rooted is my home and will be throughout this lifetime. Here in this place all I need is freely given to me. The radiant life-giving sunlight from dawn to dusk each day – always the soft air, each day with a new quality, sometime mist and cloud, sometimes full on bright powerful heated light; the pink sunsets, purple and gold.; the colors of light that bathe me in their life giving energies and feed the countless leaves on my crown, sending the stuff of life coursing throughout my entire structure. Some days, the shimmering rains come, the lightning and thunder, followed by birdsong. These fragrant rains that soak my roots and feed every cell of my being are freely given. To receive these gifts is simply to be alive.

Perhaps your two legged self cannot imagine the exhilaration, the delight of my life, the expansion, the satisfaction, the joy, the awareness of all that is, the tuning in to the subtle energies of life beyond what humans can sense because my life experience is so different than yours.

You were created to move freely, to journey, to seek your daily bread in various ways. Many of you are restless in your movements and unsettled. Your lives are more complicated, take more maintenance than the life of a tree.

When your lives overwhelm you, take a breath and imagine yourself as a tree. Send your roots down to the core of the earth. Breathe life giving earth energies in to your center and allow your awareness to expand upward, riding a shaft of sunlight, or the trunk of a tree, opening into full expansion and delight at your crown.

Whatever life path you choose with your ease of movement, remember to stay rooted in your true purpose here on this sweet green earth that needs you and your gifts. Then you can expand with confidence and ease into you true nature. Be proudly who and what you were born to be. Take delight in the life your have created for yourself within the limits of your physical self.

Beautiful things

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P of Des Moines, Iowa asks:

Q. What is the most beautiful thing GCW has witnessed?

A. I feel the energies of all beings as we are all connected in the magnificent web of creation. The exhilaration, the throb and pulse, the ebb and flow of the energies of life are known to me. They are unseen to most, but real – the building blocks of your visible and palpable world.

As I witness, I too am a participant. I feel and know the heart expanding love of a mother for her baby as they pass under my branches. I feel the pure joy in flocks of birds as they dance in synchronized motion, the effortless soaring of vultures as they spread their wings on hot sunlight and fly figure eights high above my crown. The earth thawing, new life unfolding each spring. Ever the same cycle, always new life. Fresh. Green. Eager.

The little barred owl that visits and feeds nearby, keeping me company on short summer nights; the dance of stars and planets; the woodpecker’s call. The rain pouring down, cleansing my leaves, flowing over my bark, filling my thirsty roots; the falling away of dead branches that have served their life’s purpose. The delicate shell like fungus that takes its sustenance from the downed wood. It is all beautiful!

The intricacy of transparent insect wings; the flowers of spring, the fruits and seeds of summer and fall,the silence of winter; waving sunlit grasses; the feeding butterflies, spreading and folding their jewel like wings. Patient deer feeling in the valley. The happy sounds of children playing; nestlings calling for their supper from the nest. The flash of a bluebird; goldfinches feeding on the thistles. It is all beautiful!

The night sky, the sunset when day is done and the sunrise to promise a new beginning; this place in which I am rooted and make my home; this living earth that feeds and supports all life. This breathtaking green planet; mud and stone, water, bedrock, and molten metal, the foundation on which we exist. I have seen and felt all of this and it is all exquisitely beautiful!

Storm damage

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M of West Des Moines, Iowa writes:

Q. A cottonwood tree near us had a large branch split and break during a storm. It has since had to be removed. I am wondering if the tree spirit can anticipate things like this happening? If they can, how do they prepare and how does it feel? And if they can not, is there any difference in the impact on them?

A. Tree spirits are fully tuned into the energies of all that is. We feel the minutest tug and pull within the web of all things, the faintest current of electricity, the tiniest energetic surge. I short, we do know what is going to happen. We are tuned into the nuances of the subtle shifts in energy, in the air, the wind, the silence of the earth, the weather. We feel change coming and know it long before you humans have knowledge of the event. You might call it pre-cognition, and think it is “magic”, but we call it full awareness. Our senses are more finely attuned to the shifting energy of all that is than those of humans.

We do not brace for death or fear the lightning strike. We let go of life just as you might drop a handkerchief on the lawn. When the jig is up, we know it and allow it to be so without a fight. It is simply part of the cycle of life and death and new life that has ever been and will always be.

What we do know while we are living is life. To send our roots into the rich black earth, to reach to the sun and soak in its life giving light, a gift beyond all price. This life. Then when this life has ended, we endure as spirit, loving all of you, holding the joy of all existence in the world of spirit that can never be destroyed.

Joyful! Joyful! Joyful!

Supporting a teenager

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June grasses

June grasses

C of central Iowa asks:

Q. What is the best way to continue to be a supportive person in a teenager’s life? How can I bring encouragement to my niece who is facing a possible chronic disease?

A. When you are apart from your niece and feeling good in yourself, simply hold her in the light of your heart. No words, no outward actions are necessary. See her at her shining best. See her in perfect health. See her glowing with happiness. See her higher self.

When you are with her in person, simply be with her with no expectations, only acceptance without fear, judgment or worry. Know her to be the shining radiance that is at the center of her being. See the best in her and of her. Do not say “Poor you.” Set the tone for the energy you want between you. In this way you will give her an idea of what is possible for her. In this way, my dear, you reweave the web of all that is – beginning in your heart.

Remember, your energy affects those around you. There is no faking it with energy. Your niece will read your energy like a book, so do this when you feel good and the good feelings will grow.

More of what?

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GCW's neighbor, Barred owl

GCW’s neighbor, Barred owl

GCW wishes to speak of the habit many humans have – the constant striving for “more”.

I do not condemn “more”. I only wish to ask you to rest now and then, to calm the constant chatter of your minds and discern what it is you want more of.

Is it not enough at times to soak in the early summer sunlight, the soft breeze, the dancing grasses, the mottled and shifting shade under a friendly tree?

Is it not enough at times to hear the call of the owl, to marvel at the effortless soaring of a vulture, to hear the pure clear note of a cardinal?

Is it not enough at times to feel the soft hair and skin of a beloved baby, to push your fingers deep into the soil as you plant seeds, to feel the cool weight of a beautiful stone in your palm?

Is it not enough at times to simply be, to sit in the center of your life and appreciate all that surrounds you, to gaze at your reflection and marvel at the miracle of your life in this body at this time, in this exact time and space?

It is right at times that your drop the content of your mind, the constant chatter, the reeling thoughts, the ever present pushing of yourself to achieve more more more. Are you afraid you are nothing without your thoughts?  Think again! Let your mind rest. Gather all those thoughts, the “must dos” “must haves” and release your grip on them. Drop them, like dropping a suitcase full of stones. See how light and free you can feel.  (You may pick them up again at any time.)

Try this and feel calmer, feel more connected to your home, the magnificent green earth.