Flowering Fridays: The Interdependent Nature of Life

Grasshopper on dying Queen Anne's Lace in our meadow last week

One of my favorite joys in the garden is how the bees and the bugs interact with the flowers.

Watching the bees* dive into one flower and then the next, both getting food for the hive and pollinating the flowers in the process. (Watching them wriggle inside the snapdragons is my absolute favorite.)

Seeing the bugs use flowers for not only for food, but also for resting and nesting places. (How wonderful to be like this grasshopper with its cushion of Queen Anne's Lace to rest upon.)

For me, seeing all the life that comes into contact with flowers is a visual reminder of how interdependent we are.

Even when we think we are alone, we're not. Even we feel disconnected, we're not. Even when we think we don't matter in the scheme of things, we are absolutely essential to all of existence.

What I'm discovering, after many, many years of feeling alone and isolated is this:

We are each so special and unique and needed in life's beautiful garden that we are never forgotten. We are loved and supported every step of the journey.

Yeah, I've said that before. Many times. But it's worth repeating as it's an easy one to forget when the journey gets tough.

But we are supported. By the people around us. By people from far away. By forces we cannot see. By people we might not ever know.

Heck, I even feel supported by this grasshopper.

The reason: the symbolic message for the grasshopper is, according to this article by Ina Woolcott  "new leaps forward /leaps of faith /jumping without knowing where you will land, leaping over obstacles" and good luck and abundance. It's a message that feels most supportive to me right now.

Yesterday, there were four painters and one contractor working in the house.

Eight rooms, including the kitchen and its cabinets, were being painted while the contractor worked on finishing the upstairs bathroom.

Huddled in our bedroom with my head hurting from the fumes, I began to slip into thoughts of overwhelm and fear:

How will this all get done in the next week? What if no one buys our house? What if we are wasting all this time and money? What if we can never move?

Down and down the spiral of negative thinking I went.

Then I saw this picture of the grasshopper.

And I remembered I don't have to do this all by myself.

I have support.

The support of my husband, my brother, my mother and father-in-law, plus a great team of helpers for the project from our awesome realtor and the great stager/decorator she's hired to the painters and contractor. To name but a few.

The support of finding the perfect people to release our "stuff" in an easy way. (God bless our friend Annette who joyfully hauled away a whole garage-full of unwanted items and sorted through them all.)

And, there's the millions of other supporters who I don't know by name, but who are supporting me on this journey nonetheless — from the person who invented packing tape to the color design team at Sherwin-Williams to whomever invented Priceline so I could find cheap and paint-fume-free rooms for us to stay in for the next few nights.

Once you start looking for support, you could literally spend your whole lifetime listing all the support you have.

It reminds me that we are so not alone and how interconnected the web of existence really is.

Tell me, who are you grateful to for support today?

 * An interesting fact I learned about bumblebees today from Wikipedia:

"....when flying a bee builds up an electrostatic charge, and as flowers are usually well grounded, pollen is attracted to the bee's pile when it lands. When a pollen covered bee enters a flower, the charged pollen is preferentially attracted to the stigma because it is better grounded than the other parts of the flower." (How cool is that!)

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.