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Life is like a garden. Let it grow. by William Whitecloud
Lately I have been so grateful for the fact that I am a conscious creator. I am really beginning to appreciate the wonder that comes of it.
I often compare creating to gardening, and the more I create the more apt I realize the comparison is. I’ve started a few gardens in my time from scratch, and to begin with they are very sparse affairs. The turf is like a sad molding patchwork quilt, and the saplings and seedlings highlight the baldness of the earth, with their placings looking too contrived and geometrical. With time, though, the grass perks up and the ground covers spread out, and as things fill out the yard begins to take on a more organic feel. And with more time still the vegetation begins to look like it was always there, with all the plants merging in to each other.
Then, when you really start to fall in love with it, the garden goes wild, bursting out in a profusion of color and wildness, taking on aspects you never planned or imagined, bringing in flocks of brightly colored birds. It loves you with a rich variety of wholesome foods and seduces you with intoxicating scents at all times of the day and night. You realize that your garden has come out. You are surrounded by a host of animal and plant personalities that begin to relate to you and show you their magic. With enough time that garden becomes the richest treasure you possess.
Gardens can teach us a lot about creating. Firstly, that it’s an investment that pays dividends. And secondly, that it takes patience and commitment. No garden was ever created without some initial spade-work and ongoing support.
So often I see people who are not trained in creating begin things only to give up at the first obstacle that presents itself. They find it easy to rationalize why it wasn’t a good idea to start with, and there are always people to support them in their cop out, and if not people then lame philosophical notions like “it wasn’t meant to be”.
The real reason that we give up on our visions is that they bring up tension for us, they make us feel uncomfortable. At some unconscious level we have beliefs that hold we can’t have what we want, and when we hit a bump in our creative road it shakes our beliefs to the self-conscious surface in the form of negative thoughts and feelings. We feel fear, anger, sadness, frustration, depression, anxiety, to name a few of the emotions that tell us things are not OK. These feelings are a form of pain that we call tension. We are conditioned to resolve our pain by abandoning what we want. And we resolve the pain of not getting what we want with all sorts of intellectual cop outs.
Joseph Campbell, the late great mythologist, uttered my most favorite quote of all time: “I think that it is childish to avoid the pain of life!” He was talking about creating. It is a big revelation to people that our subconscious creativity is actually engaged by tension, and that, conversely, when we resolve tension we disengage our creative aspect. As Campbell would tell you, the initiated adult “hangs with the tension”; they can handle the pain of life. The warrior proclaims, “It’s a good day to die.” They are brave enough to let the pain of life get them.
When we resolve tension we give our subconscious the day off. We are telling it that its services are not required. When we hold the tension we put our subconscious to work. It has no choice but to come up with a solution. This is when our genius comes to the fore. Not many people experience their genius because they are always running away from it. But when we “hang with the tension” our highest faculties are drafted into action, and miracles begin to happen, both in terms of solutions and outcomes. The garden of our life begins to grow.
I have experienced this kind of divine momentum in every area of my life, though the area I am most proud of is my vocation as a change consultant. I developed from doing the odd reading every couple of weeks to running intuition workshops to leading year long trainings to writing books and now on the speaking circuit and starting to work on transformational CD’s and on it goes. And if you think I didn’t have any obstacles, think again. I was traumatized by doing readings to start with. I got run out of towns, literally. I was a hopeless facilitator to start with. I went through several periods of getting no work. Hell, I nearly died several times. I wasn’t schooled in writing. You name it, if there is an obstacle out there I’ve come up against it. But, man, the knowledge it’s brought me to, the people it has surrounded me with, the creativity it immerses me in, the abundance it has blessed me with, the connection to the divine – it’s my garden, my heart and soul garden.
There is a question everyone should ask themselves, and it is this, “Am I here to avoid the pain of life, or am I here to create my life?” In truth, there can only be one answer.
William Whitecloud
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