I have this odd affiliation with plants that started when I first saw The Secret Garden as a kid and I adored the wildness, the protectiveness, the seclusion of the beautiful garden that grew just as it was meant to, just as it wanted to.  I think on some level my soul always knew that I wanted to be just as wild, just as free, just as accepted exactly as I was.  I didn’t want anyone to tame me or tell me which way to grow.  Ironically as I grew up and worked through life, that is the furthest thing from what happened—I lost the ability to discern and just do what I wanted to do, I couldn’t tell what I wanted to do.  I had lost the ability to listen to my heart telling me what I needed to do and I needed people to tell me what the right thing was.

Just like we must prune back good flowers, we must constantly be pruning back our life to make room for the more abundant and full.  It is ok o let go of “good” things so you can hone in on the “great” things.  This was on my calendar the other day and it got me thinking about how there are things in this life that we try to grow, hoping they take hold and branch off into something beautiful.  Truthfully I’m still learning a lot about plants and gardening (I tried and failed—but I will try again!) and I noticed I had a habit of leaving things exactly as they were.  I didn’t want to trim pieces or prune back what looked like perfectly good flowers even though people told me to, I didn’t want to make it any different, I wanted the plants to grow how they were meant to, more how they wanted to 

I’m learning now that with gardening there are times you must pull back the flowers in order to make the plant grow healthier.  Making the decision to let some things go in order to make room for more is a concept we talk about frequently in self-development yet I tried to cram all things into one plant without pruning anything to allow more stalks to bloom.  The entirety of our lives can’t fit on one plant—we are meant to grow and branch out and create a firm system that creates and is able to sustain the story of our life.  I’ve said it a million times: life is about growth and expansion and our evolution requires that we cut away what doesn’t work—we are taught this in nature.  So my very nature I felt calling to me as a kid recognized the wildness and the ability to foster growth early on and wanted to connect with that spirit.  Just as I’m learning to grow things, I know I can learn which pieces I’m ready to let go of and which I’m ready to expand on.  No one needs to tell me which way to go—the heart knows the way.