“Plant your garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers,” Jose Luis Borges.  This seemed timely following yesterday’s piece.  Generations ago we were taught we needed permission to do just about anything.  Our family and our elders and society and how things functioned determined our access so we got in the habit of believing we needed permission to do what interested us.  We got in the habit of creating access issues to certain things whether we decided only certain people could participate, only those who could afford it, only those who proved their worth, etc. and we created a system that supported the exclusivity of doing what we love.  We learned to protect that rather than protect ourselves, our integrity, our values, and our own interests.  We learned to survive by blending in with the crowd and shoving aside our natural instincts in favor of what we were told was the safe route.  That is a recipe for regret and disaster in our personal lives.  While those at the top thrive in that environment, it isn’t set up to help those moving the wheel.  So if we are called to do something, we don’t need any more permission than that.

When we wait for someone to create the life we want, we set ourselves up for disappointment, resentment, delays, heartache, and any other myriad emotions that come from hinging our dreams, goals, and desires on the actions of other people.  As social creatures of course we want validation, but we all get to a point where we are no longer interested in doing the same thing to fulfill other people’s dreams.  We have to find our own path and we need to take action rather than waiting for someone to do it for us.  As I talked about yesterday, life is too short to wait for anyone to do for us what we need to do for ourselves.  The irony is when we do the things we love we suddenly have all the time in the world.  So there is the answer to this conundrum: if we don’t want life to pass us by, we need to find a way to slow time down, and since we can’t actually physically do that, we need to learn to fill the time we have with the things we love to create more of it.  Joy, passion, hope, drive, creativity are all things we plant ourselves or things we were born with.  Our job is to tend to it just like we would a garden.  Take care of those seeds and let them bloom into something that will grow into the garden of our dreams.

I want to touch on the idea that waiting for someone to bring us flowers means we are waiting for someone to cut the blooms off of their own garden (or take it from someone else) in order to fulfill the dreams we are responsible for.  It can take a lot of patience and effort to make something like that bloom for us and we need to believe that we can make it bloom.  We have a vision and we need the patience and dedication to make it happen—and we can only get that by learning to cultivate the life around us.  Follow the signs, the seasons, the natural flow of our lives.  Let go of what doesn’t serve, rest when we need to, plant when we need to, and utilize the tools we have to make that garden grow.  The vision is ours and no one else is responsible for making that happen.  We don’t need to defer our dreams for the sake of someone else or some idea of what we are meant to do.  We are meant to nurture and plant and cultivate our dreams until it blooms fully and we can sustain ourselves and be a light to others as well.  Align and do what gives us light in our own lives and we ignite something far greater than someone else’s idea of what we are supposed to do with our lives: we answer the call of our soul and it turns into the most beautiful thing we have ever seen.

We are meant to create and there doesn’t always need to be a reason that makes sense to other people: it needs to make sense to ourselves.  If painting calls, paint.  If making miniatures calls, build miniatures.  Love what we do because there isn’t enough love in this world.  The more we love, the more we fuel our growth and encourage growth in others.  We’ve been taught that unless our dreams are so big we get a name for ourselves that they aren’t worth it, and often times when dreams are that big we are also told they are unrealistic.  The universe doesn’t care the size of our dreams, it only cares about the purpose in them.  It cares about the care we put into our passion and drive and when we have that level of dedication and commitment, the world explodes into color and we find new ways of doing things, of looking at things, of creating our own possibilities.  We just need to make the life that makes sense to us.  There is beauty in this world and we are part of that—that is all the validation we need to follow the call of our soul.