A Tulip, that’s Me…

Written by Ada den Hollander

‘Has she gone mad?’ You may think when you read this headline. Read on and you will see that it is not too bad and that you may also be a tulip or a daffodil or a violet for example.

I can get quite upset about a lot of different things. To name a few:

The injustice in the world

The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots

That people don’t have anything to eat, something that is no longer limited to the children in Africa

Corruption of government leaders, something that is no longer limited to Africa or South America

Destruction out of helplessness or out of anger

The idea that war offers a solution and is justifiable

Lies that are told and which we easily take for granted. If you repeat a big lie often enough, it will automatically become the truth. This phenomenon is called the “illusory” truth in cognitive psychology. Adolf Hitler introduced the term The Big Lie, but the term is also attributed to Joseph Goebbels

The extreme control bordering on tyranny. By politicians, by your boss, by religions or by any authority

Child abuse and the ever-expanding paedophile network

Domestic violence

and…. the fact that I don’t do anything substantial about it. I am not founding an organisation or joining a group that stands for something, I am not on the barricades. I admire people who do, who fight injustice with all their hearts in whatever form it takes. I sometimes feel guilty about that.

It should be clear that my ego plays a role here. Hadn’t you better, shouldn’t you, what are you doing anyhow, the ego whispers in my ear.

That’s their life path and not yours, my wise friend Loraine said to me recently. If you are a tulip, you are not a rose. Both are equally unique, equally beautiful, but different. Accept who and what you are, you are good enough. Don’t bend over backwards to be somebody you’re not. It is what it is. Everything happens as it should. Being agitated changes nothing and is bad for your health. Let it go. The world has always been in chaos. That makes absolute sense and of course, deep down I know it, but it’s good to hear it again.

Humanity has a lot to learn, which is why we are here on Earth. We have to wake up from the dream, the illusion, become aware, know that we are spiritual beings, that we are one collective consciousness, with different aspects.

It always comes down to love, love for another and to start with, especially love for yourself. If we realise that, everything will be fine.

Only love is real, as the American psychiatrist Brian Weiss so brilliantly tells us in his book. Something to remember over and over and to apply to your life, whoever you are.

Who are you?

Ebb and Flow of Life by Vanessa Anderson

In the beginning we were connected, rooted within communities in which every member of that society had a purpose, a place and a gift it honoured its collective membership with. There were the protectors, the teachers, the gatherers and the collectors of truth and all were welcomed at the feast and each had their story to share, the old and the young alike and those who wove words threaded a fabric that clothed their past and guided the path to come.

There were deep roots to source through the healers, the medicine men and women ordained through insight to help others recognise the light in themselves. There was a knowing, a trusting in the accounts that were to follow as well as those had had passed, an understanding of the role that each had to play and all of this had us firmly rooted, connected and within reach of each other, an interdependent web of creation that ebbed and flowed in a thriving symbiosis.

Over the eons that stretched from the beginning, the threads grew taut, some held, some snapped and recoiled, spiralling helixes in the network of time and we were left with memories held only in the flight of our dreamtimes.

Over this time that we all now find ourselves, the implausible peculiarity that has catapulted our already fragile connection to source – I find myself in a foreign place, longing for that familial embrace. It is that dread of finding yourself in the centre of a room, it is grand with high ceilings and gilded mouldings and everywhere people in conversation both gaudy and muted, familiar in faces and frequent embraces, I should feel acquainted, a consort, included. Instead I am found to be alone in a room full of people.

I flit and I flutter from one to another, my voice is as soft as the skirt on a flower but inside my head it’s a thundering bellow. A stumble of words over numbers and matters that matter in truth neither value nor substance, we dance and we flirt around what really matters and discount our senses and truth on the matters.

So far from the ebb and the flow we have travelled that the stars that once lit our night sky have faded from memory. In my dreamtime I sit beneath those distant stars, held warm by the fabric of our story tellers, the teachers, the healers and the warriors. I smell the fires, see the flames and dance with the wisdoms of the ancients.

I long to meet you there, where you and I do not need to feel alone in a room full of people, where I see you, and you see me, to connect with the familial that is who we really are, for you and I are not alone under the stars, we are the stars, a twinkling pin hole in a dark sky, a gathering light in a darkness whose time has come to pass.

Come, sit with me and let us talk – free of ego, an unrevised, unedited and unapologetic conference of truth and if words do not come, let us sit together in silence, in the quiet that recognises the ‘us’ in each other. Let’s start a conversation under the night sky, let us be the spark in each other.