WALKING THROUGH THE GARDEN OF LIFE

Dear Students, Many of you write to me privately, and I answer your emails eventually. Here's an email I wrote to a student, which I am posting here for all of you. I have left off identifying information, so as to keep the person's identity private, though I know she wouldn't mind her name being here. Here is my email to her:
Everything I write is for me. The words that I have written for years now, the messages, the words I have said, now their meaning becomes more and more clear. I learn what it is to live in this new awakening, like I have walked into a beautiful garden --

-- like when you work in your garden at home…and then I come and visit, people come, and walk through your garden. Each time it is new. What people see depends upon their vision. Do they see the hard work you have given to it? Do they see the love you have given? When someone walks in your garden, they are walking in your love, the effort you have given. And so it is a magical place. It is a place to be in the present.

It is like I am walking in a garden and I am noticing what is there. Is there a weed? Is there a bumble bee? Is there a cat? Is there a thorn?

There is what is there, in the garden, and there is what we bring to the garden. If I bring eyes of pain, I see through eyes of pain. If I bring eyes of envy, I see through those eyes. If I bring eyes of gratitude, I see through those eyes.

When I walk through your garden with eyes of gratitude, eyes of the present, then I become one with you, your hard work, your effort, your joy:  the realization that your garden was created through hard effort and joy. I am no longer separate from you. I feel your hands in the soil, your fingers, your being, your breath, the dirt beneath your fingernails, your sweat, your nurturing energy, your generous spirit, your joy in sharing. I feel the work of all your ancestors, of those who walked that earth before you, I am one with you, with gratitude, with your heart, because your heart is there in the earth, in the garden you have created. And we are one.

If I come with depression, with greed, with envy, then I experience only separation. I am separate from you and all others. I live in a painful world that is not real except as I give it reality.

The earth is a garden. Everywhere I walk I experience only myself. There is nothing else. How can I be separate from anything then?

Continue to grow and nurture your own garden. Continue to show up for your spiritual life. The job you were offered, it was a trick, a trick to make you believe that you could be “somebody." You are not here to be somebody like that.

You are here to be in the center of your own garden. Stay there. Let each step be a step on your garden path, a path that does not lead in a straight line, but in concentric circles, each circle becoming wider, expanding with love and light, true love, not ego love.

The angels say you have made a wise choice in saying no to the job, since you then said no the maya, to the darkness. Continue to say yes, yes, yes, to your spiritual life.

My message now is to never give up. Keep working. Never think you are at the end. Never think you have arrived. Never think you are there. Never think that thinking knows. Never think. Do nothing. Be nothing. Never resist. Say no to pain. Say no without resistance and one day that no will come from a higher source and direct the flow of your life in all ways.

I am not there. I have not arrived. There is no where to be. We must not give up working. We must think each day, if we think, now the work has just begun. This moment is so exciting. We must face each moment with total enthusiasm. Each moment is new. Each moment unfolds like a perfect flower.

This awakening is natural. It unfolds like a flower in a field.
 

The mistakes many so-called enlightened beings have made is they thought they were at the end. They thought they had achieved something. They thought they could tell others and that their work was done. The individual identified with the not doing, with the 'awakening' with the words they spoke and taught. There was an intellectual understanding, and it did not reach the heart.

Life is joy. Work is joy. Learning is joy.  It is fun. So why give it up? Why think, “I have arrived.” There is no one to arrive. There is no where to arrive to.

Can your garden ever arrive? Can you suddenly look at your garden and say, now it is the perfect garden. I have created the perfect garden. Yes. I have arrived.

No. Each year you must go into the garden and put your hands into the earth or the garden goes its own way and the vegetables stop producing and the flowers turn and whisper to themselves and do what they want. All the nature spirits turn towards each other and the plants and ignore you.

We must know that for so long as we exist here in physical form that we must tend our own garden. We must never become complacent. Then the joy of God flows through us. And we must continue to show up for our garden, in our garden. Then we become a light in this world, like your garden is a light, a light of comfort, nourishment, and beauty for all who come there — and you are not separate from that garden. You are the garden you create and work on each day.

Your garden was not meant to be that job, those people, that mindset. That would have taken you away from, not towards, your Self.

Now in each moment I will see what happens, without resistance. Everything is. Let me see what is in the garden today, what the garden needs from me today, what the beautiful nature spirits have to say to me today, what the angels in all their golden glory have to say today.

In the beauty