A More Loving Way to Thrive

“Look around you at the bees and the yellow, pink, and fuchsia flowers. Notice the many shades of green, the blue in your windmills, and the whitish-gray limestone rocks.

Listen to the birds’ song. Hear the plane overhead and a tractor cutting in the field. Man’s domination of nature—its crushing, grinding, piercing, overthrowing of the natural—brings an unsettling feeling to your soul. You feel as if you must run out to the field to see what is being demolished. You feel you must make sure the tractor isn’t running over your flowers, bushes, or trees. Let the tractor stay on its side of the field and leave yours alone.

Man rushes in with his gadgets, technology, and myopic ideas about his “one right way” to do things, oblivious to the ramifications of his actions upon butterflies, bees, birds, smaller creations, and their habitat of flowers, native grasses, shrubs, and trees.

Many times in your own life you have seen “one right way” to do things—the “tried and true” way you’ve always done them. At times you’ve moved forward, oblivious to the rippling impact on other people, habitats, and creations that comes from implementing your “one right way.”

There is a time and a place for both ways of being, but this season of your life is for creative exploration—letting some things look chaotic and wild as they grow. Then you walk through and find the treasures, releasing the need to spend your time managing and controlling. It’s time for letting things be—letting them live—while you make small moves to clear away the unnecessary and unfruitful as the good grows.

Review how you spend your time. I’m not asking you to bulldoze your life and start from scratch. Let much of it be what it is—as messy or chaotic as it may be at the moment. When things become clearer, you can uproot the invasive and the toxic. By their removal, you’ll give more nourishment and space to what is beautiful and fruitful. As you do this, you’ll give yourself, the earth, and other people more kindness and grace.

Now is the time for small moves, tweaks, and selective weeding. There’s too much beauty here to bulldoze it all and plant a monocrop.

For decades you planted monocrops—business ventures—with singleness of purpose: to make money or to teach others to make money. Men have turned nature, gardening, and farming into a monocrop of profit. Similarly, they have ordered their lives around monocrops of profit and entertainment.

I’m asking you to stop living your life for profit or entertainment. Instead, focus on creativity, joy, love, and beauty. In doing so you will be of greatest service to your fellow beings, the earth, and all the creatures upon it.

This is a more relaxed, loving way to thrive.”