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Nature is full of unspoken lessons all around us.
It's not until we're open to hearing them that we pick them up. All the wise mystic folks from history tell us this: the answers are to be found in nature.
Nature never wastes energy.
It wins the 'most efficient' award. It's had gazillion of years to dial it all in. So we might as well turn to it and observe the lessons.
Water is a teacher. Trees are a teacher. Rocks are a teacher. And, most recently for me, a tomato plant.
I was at my friend's farm the other night when he took me on a quick tour of his garden. Right off the bat, he took me over to his cherry tomato plants growing higher than I am tall (6'6).
I had never in my life seen such high yield on a plant - it was crazy! Every.Single.Branch of every single plant was completely full of tomatoes.
I asked him the immediate 'wtf' question of how he did it and he casually explained how he pruned his suckers. (I dug deeper in my questioning because I still didn't understand.)
The plant has one main stem reaching towards the sky, the tallest point, and several other main branches where the fruit actually grows. The suckers are the new branches that start to grow out of the main stem, even though there's already several established branches. The goal is to snip these off as soon as you see them start to emerge.
If you don't, they will grow bigger and start to suck the plant's energy away from the other branches. It will spread the finite amount of energy the plant has too thin, causing less fruit per branch and probably not as big/healthy either.
Who would have thought? But makes total sense upon hearing it.
On the drive home, I realized we all have our own suckers. Except we're not as good about pruning.
We aren't usually tending the garden of our mind. Instead, we let the suckers grow more frequently & bigger than we ought to. If you consider our focus to be like the plant, then every time we allow suckers to thrive, we de-energize all the other things we were previously devoted to.
There's only so much energy to go around and we have to be absolutely adamant on pruning what's not serving our focus.
You want a high-yielding life, right? You want the fruits of your labor to be plump and abundant? In order to do that, as with how nature gets down, you have to maintain narrow channels for focused energy to flow.
It's not just energy either. It's time.
We work with the same allotted hours everyday: 24. How we choose to spend it is up to us, but we'd be better off if we brought to a minimum the amount of suckers that stole any bit of that 24hr gift.
We are the gardeners of our minds. We decide what gets to live here. Yes, you could let it run wild, but best of luck to you because God knows what'll grow if you don't intentionally manage your energy.
I fundamentally believe there HAS to be a most harmonious way of doing things. There's a balance between forcing and feeling.
When you're pruning your suckers, you'll know what needs to be apart of the main stem and what's causing diversion.
Most people just flap around in the wind of the world, letting anything and everything take them off course. Maybe it's because they're not disciplined enough to prune the suckers or maybe it's because they haven't found a sun to grow towards.
Deep down, I think we all know the way. 🌞
