The Garden Within

From competition to cultivation.

I once sat beneath a maple tree in New Orleans.

Scattered across the ground were acorns.

And I remember thinking how wild it is that one of these — just one — might find itself positioned in such a way, maybe picked up by a squirrel, buried and forgotten, only to break through the soil years later as an oak.

What are the odds?

How many of these acorns never become trees —
yet still serve?

Some nourish the soil.
Some feed the animals.
Some decompose and return their energy to the earth.

None are wasted.

All are in service.

All are interdependent.

All are participating in something larger than themselves.

And none of them are performing.

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Sitting there, I realized something humbling.

At best, my relationship to that acorn is stewardship.

I cannot add to it to make it more oak.

I cannot improve its blueprint.

I can steward the space it grows in.
I can co-create an environment where it thrives.

But I cannot make it more of what it already is.

And it cannot make me more of what I already am.

That changes everything.

If it is true for the acorn, it is true for me.

Everything that will ever be
already lives within.

Blooming is not performance.

Blooming is a byproduct of being.

The oak does not compete to become.

It becomes because it is.

Which means I don’t have to compete to become either.

There is enough.

There is timing.

There is inevitability in the revelation of self.

And I don’t get to dictate that timing.

I only get to witness it.

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Something else is true for the acorn, the oak, and me.

When grounded in the present moment, we all have access to source.

Call it God.
Call it energy.
Call it evolutionary intelligence.

However you define it —

Source only exists now.

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If you’d like to keep walking this path together, the reflection continues below.