Grow like a plant

Through my life I face the phenomena that society demands me to put labels on myself and to be able to formulate, what do I want to do with my life. I don’t really have a clue, so I just say something that feels appropriate in the moment. Yet what do you want is a question for the brain. You may also consider what your heart has to say about that.

During one of the lectures I heard something that struck me. He said, the universe has a plan with you. Let go of what you want and tune in to what the universe wants with you. And then you grow into that person.

Would that not be amazing? Just to grow like a plant, effortless and towards the sun?

So how do you do that? How do you tune in with the universe’s will? How do you hear the call of your spirit?

"How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing -
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

For me the first step is to create a safe place and give myself the time. Because circumstance is everything.

I was visiting a little patch of forest the other day. It is one of the last remaining patches of the original Caledonian forest in Scotland. One of the last remaining patches of original forest in Europe. It is tiny tiny. A few hours to walk around. And it is dying, you look around and see only old trees, but no young ones. At first. If you look closer, you find the young ones, close to the ground. Without leaves, tiny bare branches. They are not so young actually, some of them are more than 20 years old. The overpopulated deer keeps eating them off, year by year. They never grow into a tree.

There is a seed in each one of us, and the universe is calling on that seed. Yet most of those seeds never grow up. They are tied by responsibilities, expectations, fear, lack of education, rationality, and so on. There is a saying that you are the average of the 5 person you spend the most of your time with. What if your circumstances eat your growth off day by day, year by year?

A safe place is not a place of comfort. It is a place where I am inspired to step out of my comfort and take challenges, experiment with my personality, with my connection to others, expand my boundaries. In a safe place people surround me who hold me in that process without expectations, and support me should I get stuck. In the end we are all human - yet how many people you allow to see you really?

@ Meall a' Bhuachaille, Cairngorms