(transcription)
“Doing your work is for us, is the life work, it’s not just doing one thing and solving that and moving on, no.
Doing your work is the entirety of your life but sometimes you need to plant a seed.”
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When we say this welcome, it is from The Ancestral Medicine Women and many blessings to you all.
So, we have been talking a lot about ‘Doing your work‘ and we are offering suggestions to assist you in doing your work.
So, continuing on with our suggestions is the idea or the concept of ‘Planting A Seed’.
Now because we are The Ancestral Medicine Women, almost all of us were herbalists of some description. Most of us would have learnt how to use the natural world and the plants that are in it to heal. So, we talk about, we use a lot of imagery and metaphors or metaphorical language when we are talking about healing and this case in the work, in your work.
So, when we talk about planting a seed, it is not necessarily about planting a seed in the garden, in the ground, but rather a metaphor, with similar possibilities and outcomes of planting a seed in the ground.
Doing your work is for us, is the life work, it’s not just doing one thing and solving that and moving on, no. Doing your work is the entirety of your life but sometimes you need to plant a seed. Now depending on the type of seed you are planting, you could have a quick growth or you could have a long hibernation of this seed, and then growth or just a very slow steady growth. Sometimes you need to fertilise to give it a little bit more oomph, a little more support. Sometimes you need to water it, talk to it, caress it. Now you can see that this can be for a seed you plant in the ground or a seed you plant in your life.
Sometimes the seeds that you plant in the ground, unknowingly because you are naive, you don’t know, you’ve never been told, you’ve not researched, are weeds and sometimes those weeds are strangulating, they move very quickly and they just annihilate everything that’s around them, because they want to take over and they want to strangle. This is the natural way of that seed and what comes out of that seed.
And sometimes in your life when you’re going on your journey the same thing can happen. You might be irritated by somebody and you spread, you make a comment, or you spread a rumour and that is the seed that you have planted.
The seed you planted about them, the seed you planted about yourself, the seed you’ve planted about your culture, about your community, your society, workplace and so on. Sometimes those seeds they can die really quickly and sometimes they can really take hold and they can just move quickly and strangulate and annilate, just like the plant we spoke about.
It is very difficult to remove this type of plant once it has really taken hold because often this type of plant will put roots down in lots of different areas, it won’t be just where you have planted the seed, it will be all over it, there will be roots. It is very difficult to pick up. You can poison it. Once you have poisoned it and yes it might die, but the ground is poisoned. And you have to wait for a very long time, sometimes generations before that ground is clear enough to plant another seed.
Sometimes there is poison, it is poisoned you have gotten rid of, and then another seed is planted in the poisoned ground and it dies, then another seed is poisoned and it also dies. Then another seed is poisoned and another seed is planted and that is a little bit protection and it grows a little bit, but it’s grown with the poison in it and it might take again a long time to grow, but the poison is in it and that will as well grow and spread.
Then there are the plants. The seeds that you plant and take to the ground and start to blossom, and as they start to blossom they start to find meaning, they start to reach for the sky, they start to reach out, they start to live their purpose and they really start to take on a sort of energy of movement, of life, of possibility, of expectancy. They don’t want to impinge on anything else, they just want to live the life they got. They don’t want to have to be dependent on anything around them except the occasional water and sun. And they are so happy in their own little world, their own eco-system.
This is an interesting situation because this plant can live like this as long as the atmosphere stays the same. If there is a slight change in the atmosphere. If it is not really been relying on any of the other plants around it or connecting in any way with those plants, it cannot survive because it has no messages, it has no information, it has no grouping with anything else, it is just there… this exotic, standalone beauty.
Once the atmosphere changes, unless it has some reserves, some resources that it can use to fight against the atmospheric change, it too will die. It will end and then what?
And then you have the planting of seeds where lots and lots of them are thrown out. They are just thrown out into the ground and hoped for the best. Some take, some don’t. Some of them are the same sort of seed and some of them are totally different, some of them are able to work together and some of them are not companions at all. They do not like each other at all. And the scatter is over such a wide and vast area that there is no possibility for comradery. There is no possibility of gathering together. They are just all over the place and in various areas that are so far apart from each other that they in some ways they are of no relevance or they don’t recognise each other, they are alone, together but alone. They are separate. Everything is barren for where they are in this very disparate area, in this vast area it’s barren around them for except where they are.
In this situation they often cannot be tendered to because it is so vast, so some can be tendered to, some cannot or some can be tendered to this time and some can be tendered to at another time, but they are all tendered to at the same time because it is absolutely impossible. It’s too many, it’s too vast, it’s too broad, it’s too much and so in the end there is a level of resignation, there is a giving up because they can’t all be kept alive. They can’t all be tendered to.
What is the decision to make? What do I keep? What do I get rid of? I love it all. I want it all and yet I can’t have it all, I can’t do it all. I can’t keep all of it!
So, then you have the situation where sometimes something is given up and something is kept and then there is always this feeling of loss and grief for what was given up, what was not able to be looked after. And there is this feeling that even though you still have these wonderful things, these other plants, these other plants are still there and they are thriving, they are trying to thrive. It’s never enough because of the loss and the grief of what could have been.
Sometimes the whole lot is given up because you can’t make the choice. It is too much. It is too much. So, all of it goes and then there is not just loss, grief, there is depression, there’s hopelessness.
So, when we talk of ‘Doing your work’ and planting a seed, we are talking about knowing what seed you want to plant.
Making the choice of WHERE you want to plant, HOW you want to plant it, HOW you want that seed to flourish and HOW are you going to be able to maintain it. And what IF it doesn’t survive? How are you going to be able to cope with that?
What is your level of resilience? What is your level of emotional maturity? How are you going to decide on the seed to be planted: plant the seed, develop it, grow it, maintain it, develop it, maintain it and keep going like that. How are you going to do that?
At the very beginning we said to ‘Do Your Work’ you have got to know yourself. Not just know it, ‘Oh yes, I know that!” You’ve got to KNOW it, UNDERSTAND it, CARE ABOUT it, ACKNOWLEDGE it, ACCEPT it and then decide on the seed that you are going to plant and make sure that you have enough to really love that seed, acknowledge and accept that seed and whatever blossoms from that.
And again, we come back to this idea of consciously doing things. Don’t just throw the seeds out there, but consciously doing it. And in that conscious way it brings meaning knowing that the seed you are planting is not just going to be for you, it’s going to be for those around you, for the generations behind you, the generations to come and not just in your family line, but in your community, in your nation, in your human species, in your group.
That’s the seed, the conscious seed that you are planting.
Now this might seem like an enormous burden and an enormous task. And it is. But when you do something consciously. When you REALLY understand and accept that everything you do, whether you do it consciously or not has an effect. So, if you are doing it consciously, you have more control and choice over the action, over the seed.
So, plant your seeds and Do Your Work.
Many blessings to you, thank you.
Next >> Love – “Do your work series”
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