Be true
When nature shows us the way to be true to ourselves, and in turn, be truly respectful in relationship with her...
A few weeks ago I happened to look up at my top shelf while doing qigong and saw one precious stalk of blue false indigo in my collection. It was dusty, faded, and fragile at this point, but I knew exactly where it had come from.
We used to have a small shrub of blue false indigo in our front yard many years ago. It came with the house when we bought it a decade ago. I was delighted when it bloomed sweet indigo flowers, and later more amazed when charcoal seedpods emerged.
After a while it grew too big and blocked the small path and part of the driveway. I transplanted it, not knowing that blue false indigo has deep roots and is sensitive and rarely survives such a move. Not surprisingly, it didn’t survive.
Something caught me in that moment, however, looking up at my top shelf – a reminder of how I love these seedpods. Maybe it’s because indigo is my favorite color, and maybe, just maybe, they’d make an indigo dye. Or that when you shake them their tiny seeds rattle inside. Or maybe it's their puffy shape and charcoal-ash texture.
Or that I didn’t know where to find them anymore. I have longed and pined for them ever since. That’s what got me into trouble.
Truthfully, I’d spent the past few days worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything to write for this post. The writing always comes, I say. Always. Eventually. Until this time, I had concluded. I had no idea what to write about. Nothing was coming. That resistance to writing was growing, too.
I had just finished making two simple chimes and a wand over the past week using blue false indigo seedpods I had gathered, but I couldn’t feel them. They were silent, and unresonant. They lacked responsiveness and weren’t aesthetically interesting.
I had found the blue false indigo seedpods while out on a walk a month ago in a community garden. I was so deliriously excited that I just grabbed them, plucking at the stalk full of seedpods, justifying it to myself somehow. It’s never how I gather natural found objects, but somehow that didn’t stop me.
I have my own way of respecting nature when I’m out gathering natural found objects – a practice, I suppose, learned long ago. Greet and ask permission and listen intuitively for the response. Try to take only what’s on the ground. If it’s not on the ground, be gentle when breaking. Heal the severed ends between the warm energy of my fingertips afterwards. Sadly, I didn’t do this with the blue false indigo seedpods that day.
I recently signed up for a Plant Wisdom online course, about how to communicate with plants and nature, and why that is so important. I wanted to go deeper, and learn new ways, but felt I had lost touch a little bit with my practice.
How much I had lost touch was clear with how I took the blue false indigo seedpods! I stole them. Wow, am I really admitting all this here? Yep. And I’m feeling the consequences.
I knew what I needed to do. I needed to talk to them. Just like this course was showing me how to do again. First, remove distractions, get present, and take a few breaths. I didn’t want to, the resistance was that strong. Maybe I knew I’d get yelled at and I was afraid of admitting I was so wrong.
I greeted each one. Then I asked for permission to have a conversation, if they’d be willing. I felt a small positive opening and the impulse to pick up one of the chimes.
The response was immediate: You didn’t ask if we wanted to be here. You just took us!
There it was.
We don’t want to be in your art. We’re seed pods and now we can’t be because we’re hanging here, tied up like bad decoration.
I felt so sad, ashamed and fully admitting my mistake and how I wronged them, and myself. I’m so sorry. You’re right, I didn't ask and you didn’t want to come with me and I tore you from your home and purpose. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.
Caressing the seed pods of the two chimes and wand, I asked them what they wanted. Set us free. I heard.
Okay, I will. I replied. And so I did.
And we want to be something else, not like this art that you made of us. They continued.
I instinctively knew to turn around then, and saw the fabric strips that they seemed to be signaling – the Phu Tai deep indigo fabric with the rice pattern from Laos.
I peered into the box of the other blue false indigo seedpods, some still on their branches. Believe it or not, a few days earlier a friend had given me a small bouquet of blue false indigo seedpods from her garden, knowing I had been seeking them out. They were given to me lovingly. I greeted all of them and asked if they wanted to be part of a new series of art sculptures. Yeah, sure! I heard.
Within thirty minutes I had made five sketches, ideas that were different from what I had made of them prior. It’s what the blue false indigo seed pods had wanted, and I listened and acted. It was a mutually reciprocal, co-creating act.
Even as sketches, they were better. They felt better - resonant, responsive, and interesting. I completed 8 in all, one each to my Connection Tier supporters.
I learned my lesson. It was a huge lesson from the blue false indigo seedpods: Be true.
May we discover our truth, in whatever way it finds us...
✻
LouLou
“Be true” was originally published as an exclusive post to my Patreon supporters in October 2022. Now it is public to you, too!
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