Nurturing the Smallest Possible Thing

This week is the moment of growth where all you can do is stand and witness.  Things are exploding.  Each and every living thing is singing, dancing, stretching, greening, waving, waking.  You want this movement, this growth and yet it can be overwhelming.   

   You acknowledge that what is growing is still small, still fragile, still, as yet, not completely formed.  Whether it is an idea, an animal, a plant or a person, this stage of growth is often not well-ordered or well-mannered.  You realize in your watchful way that this dis-order is not, in fact, dis-ease.  This dis-order is creativity, growth.  When you witness patiently such growth in its dis-order, the creative has room to find full expression, room to bring in unexpected yet welcome innovation.  

In nature, you will see this kind of energy in the way grass (and dandelions) will grow wherever they can, in the way birds will nest in the most unlikely of places (like the bathroom vent or the gutter), or in yourself as you move to order your world and fall in love all over again with your oldest pair of shoes.  As you tend and witness this stage of growth in people, too, you will often see great bouts of ideas, inspirations, creative projects beginning to take shape. 

Try this; sit and take in a whole tree.  Sit and see if you can see each and every leaf, each and every blossom, each and every shaking limb even for just a moment.  Can you relax your eyes, your senses and see every little thing? Can you bear witness to things and energy without claiming any for your own?  Witnessing like this is, for me, like holding a chicken.  I never really wanted to hold a chicken, they seem so nervous, so senseless to me.  Yet holding that living breathing, mostly crazy being, I felt such incredible softness with such a rapid delicate heart I could have cried with love.  What you witness is not yours and yet it becomes an experience in your world. 

This is Xiao Chu - Hexagram 9 - Small Accumulates.  It doesn’t sound like much and yet this is the power of caring for each and every thing in your world.  Each relationship, each plant, each item of clothing or each book.  In your care you gather the energy without owning any of it.  You appreciate, take in, give of your attention, but you don’t try to own or squirrel such a thing away.  You allow it to keep growing.  This is the essence of our gentle care, the result our sensitive witnessing; the room to grow.