What I’ve learned from flowers

At the beginning of the summer I planted my very first flower garden. Over the last couple months I have learned so many things from them as I’ve watched them grow. It is a different type of knowledge that comes from watching nature – a knowledge that seems to be more universal than anything you could read in a book or learn in a classroom.

So what have I learned from my beautiful flower garden? The first thing I learned was flowers appreciate good soil – but I also learned it is not the most important thing to them. The fact is even with the best soil flowers require water and sunlight to grow.

But like with all things too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. During the hottest months of the summer I had to build a sun shade to protect them from getting too much sun. After about a month of growth a realized that 1/2 of my 16ft garden was doing better than the other half. I didn’t know why at first. Both sides looked good – but one side looked like a forest. It made no sense at first because when I planted the flowers they were all the exact same size.

So I started to pay attention and I noticed I actually habitually watered the other side just a little more each night. Now I know your probably laughing – thinking “duh, common sense could have told you that was the cause.” But it really made me realize the at the deepest level the power of focus.

And it got me to ask myself “what thoughts am I watering just a little more than others?” Because I saw how much just a little more water made a huge difference in the size of my flowers. And I mean the difference was huge. So if the bad things in your life are bigger than the good – start watering the good and stop wasting all your water(focus) on the bad.

Now its been three months and my flowers are huge and they all started leaning over. So of course not knowing why this was are how to fix it – I googled it. As it turns out flowers once they get so big get to heavy and can’t support their own weight. So I took the advice of a blog and got a bunch of sticks stuck them in the ground to help my flowers so that they could continue to grow and not have all the pressure of holding up their own weight. The sticks support a good percentage of their weight for them. Think about that as a flower grows and the bigger it grows the more support it needs. I think this is the most profound lesson I have learned in my whole entire life!

The lesson is as we grow and develop we realize we too require support or we will have no choice but to fall to the ground and grow parallel instead of our desired vertical growth. All of this now seems so simple – but crazy how the simplest things are the most profound.