Category: Words To Live By

I don’t proclaim myself to be a great gardener but I certainly enjoy working in one. Over the years, I’ve come to learn that it’s important to prune many flowers, plants, and trees so that they can grow healthier, stronger, and a lot more lush. I’ve also come to learn more recently that this same principle holds true within the spiritual me as well.

As a gardener, pruning something normally requires some form of shears to get rid of the unwanted parts of vegetation being grown. But pruning oneself can be a little more complicated than that. To better understand what it involves, picture yourself as one of those flowers, plants or trees that has been growing for as long as you’ve been alive. For all those times that you have done kind and loving acts for not only yourself, but others too, and kept yourself in a healthy state of mind, body, and soul, those were the times where you were regularly pruning yourself. Now for all those moments in your life where you might have fallen into various addictions, or brought toxic people into your lives, or earned money in ways that produced mostly stress for yourself, or eaten totally unhealthy, those were the times where you weren’t pruning yourself.

So what happens for a gardener when they don’t prune their flowers, plants, or trees? I’ll take the petunias that have been growing all summer in my garden as an example. Having originally planted them in the late Spring, I left my petunias unattended for several months, except for making sure they stayed watered. The result was that they began to grow in various directions, looking oddly shaped, where parts of them even started to die off. This made all of them appear rather unattractive and unhealthy. So with each one of them, I took a pair of shears and cut them 3/4’s of the way back. To a passer by, this might have seemed drastic because I got rid of so much of the plants producing these flowers. But within a week or so, they had all grown mush bushier and more vibrant, and created many more flowers than what had even been there before I had done the pruning.

In my own life, to prune means to cut back the unwanted growth that came during all those periods where I wasn’t living in that good state of mind, body, and soul. Over the past few years, what that has entailed has been letting go and saying goodbye to those toxic people I brought into my life. It’s meant staying away from all the things that I got addicted to. It’s meant finding a job or work that brings me peace, happiness, and joy in doing it. And it’s meant eating a lot more healthier on a daily basis. All of these actions have pruned back that spiritual tree within me and as a result, spurred a lot of spiritual growth since.

Because of the regular pruning I continue to do in my spiritual life, I find I am becoming a lot more peaceful and content, and that my mind remains more clear than clogged up. I believe the writing I’ve been doing in this blog is the sole result of this spiritual pruning that I’ve been doing throughout my life. Prior to doing any pruning at all on myself, I couldn’t even spend a few moments writing anything at all. It was as if my mind was off in too many directions to get any type of focus and clarity. That is no different than taking a flowering plant and letting it grow unattended for years.

For a gardener, pruning is often a crucial step to maintaining beautiful flowers, plants, or trees. For a person that desires to become spiritual, pruning oneself is just as crucial to maintaing one’s brightness, beauty, and love. I encourage everyone today to take a moment, breathe, and look at the ares in your life that could use some pruning. Don’t be afraid to use those shears to prune out parts of your life. You might be surprised to see the spiritual growth you spur within yourself by doing so.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

How often do you find yourself letting too much time pass by without connecting to a loved one? Is it days, weeks, months, or even years that time eludes you until one day you begin to wonder how long it’s been since you talked to your brother, sister, mother, father, relative, friend, or some other loved one?

We all live in a busy world with busy schedules and have busy lives right? Well that’s at least what we tell ourselves. But what if that day comes when we are notified a person we love dearly but hadn’t reached out to for some time has passed away suddenly? How then do we feel about all that busyness?

I’ve lost my mother, father, and a few close friends very unexpectedly in my life. Prior to their deaths, I had all the excuses in the world on why I couldn’t make the time to reach out, say hello, and spend even five minutes talking with them. After each of their passings, I held immense guilt on the many times that I made excuses to picking up that phone and calling any of them.

Look, there are 24 hours in a day. That’s 1440 minutes that each of us find ways to occupy. And sadly, many of us, like I once did, fail to take even five minutes out of that to contact a loved one we don’t get to see all that often.

My sister is a good example of this and it saddens me that she hasn’t fully grasped this concept yet. I have often struggled to get a hold of her and am normally the one doing the work to set up a time to talk. What many people like her forget about is that all we really have is today and none of us know whether it could be the last day we breathe life into ourselves. After losing enough people so suddenly in my life, I have learned this lesson and realized that life is way too short. When I think about someone today who I haven’t reached out and contacted in awhile, I don’t put that action off any longer. Even if that’s taking a few minutes away from “the busyness” of my life.

In my most “busiest” moments of my life when I was consulting full time in the computer world or running a bed and breakfast that I once owned, there were still plenty of moments I could have found the time to reach out to a loved one. But what happened back then for me was I very selfish and placed my own priorities ahead of doing something selfless like contacting a loved one just to say hi. So after an exhausting day I usually convinced myself I was too tired to call and instead watched television. And for all those times during the day when I was in my car commuting anywhere, I either listened to music or dialed the people I placed as “more important”, which ironically were just people that fed my ego. The long and short of it really came down to my selfishness and self-centeredness. I’m not sure if I can say that’s the case for everyone though, such as my sister.

Some people, like my sister, really just have hectic schedules throughout every day. In her case, not only does she have three children to take care of, one of which is under one year old, she also holds down a full time computer consulting job. Finding any free time throughout the day often proves to be very difficult for her because of this. And when she does find a moment free, often the only thing she really wants to do is rest. I do have compassion for this, but I also know that it’s just as important to work into a schedule a few minutes to reach out to those that one loves. Isn’t it better to do that, then never to do so at all and then one day find out that person you kept putting off contacting is now deceased?

Please don’t get me wrong. I know people like my sister are busy. I can be busy. Life can be busy. But really, is our lives that busy to spare just a few minutes of it on any given day to do such a simple task of dialing a loved one?

I encourage each of you today to take a moment, breathe, and think about all those people you really love and haven’t talked to in awhile. Visualize yourself getting a phone call from someone tomorrow telling you that one of those loved ones has passed away. Feel in your heart what that would be like and I’m sure it will be enough to convince you to take five minutes out of your busy life to reach out to them right now.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I received an inspirational story in e-mail some time ago that I felt was worth sharing here. While it may be fictional, it really is a testament to the power of unconditional love….

—————————————————————————————————————

There once was a man who was sentenced to death. Before he was taken away, the condemned man begged the king, “Please allow me three days’ time to put my affairs in order and to make sure that my family is taken care of.”

“How will I know that you will come back?” asked the king. Almost immediately, the condemned man’s best friend raised his hand and said, “I will take his place. If he doesn’t come back, you can hang me instead.”

Three days passed, and the condemned man had not returned. When it came time for the hanging, the king’s guards turned to the man who had offered himself as a substitute and said, “You will have to take his place.”

Just before the noose was slipped over the man’s head, a voice suddenly rang out in the distance. “I’m here! I’m here! Stop! Stop!” The condemned man ran forward from the crowd to take his rightful place on the gallows.

At this point, however, the friend had already made up his mind to die in the first man’s stead. “You were late,” he said. “So maybe this was meant to be my destiny. You have a family who needs you. I’m alone, already here and ready to go.”

The two friends argued back and forth, each one choosing to die for the other. Seeing this, the king declared a stop to the hanging, saying, “My sentence was meant for one man, but I see that if I were to kill one of you it would be as though I were killing two people. Both of you can go free.”

—————————————————————————————————————

The point of this story is that each friend was willing to face death for each other and through that act of love, it moved the king’s heart enough to set them both free. For any of us to grow spiritually in life though, it doesn’t necessarily require something this profound to take place either. Nor is it mandatory to diligently attend some form of weekly worship service, study a religious book, or pray fervently. While each of those can hold an important part of one’s spiritual journey, the more decisive actions that help to place us on that path is when we tap into our time, money, or talents and offer them unconditionally to others.

It’s easy for all of us to be in a receive mode, but there are many opportunities every day for us to extend ourselves lovingly to others in a selflessly giving one. A few days ago I was at a light waiting for it to change and there was a homeless man standing there in the steamy heat of the day with a cardboard sign asking for money. The unspiritual, unloving, and selfish me would have thought the person should get a job or that they are going to just take any money they get and go buy alcohol or drugs. But the spiritual and loving me that I’m trying to become today has removed much of those judgments and took action by giving a dollar out of my pocket to the man and telling him “God bless” as I drove away. None of us know just how profound even something like this smallest action of unconditional love could change a person’s life.

And while the story I originally shared above is an extreme example of how an act of unconditional love held great depth and weight, it is a parable that was written by someone to show the potential of love within all of us. Maybe each of us could start seeing that same potential within ourselves by shifting some of our thinking away from what God’s love can do for us in this world, and focusing that energy instead on what actions we can take to start unconditionally loving all of God’s people a lot more.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson