Picking Up Leaves in the Wind

Once you wash your dishes, do they stay clean? Your clothes? Do your refrigerator and pantry stay full of food? Your car full of gas? I think you know the answers. I do too. So you won’t think I’m silly, or insane, for picking up the leaves in my garden each morning and each evening before watering. The garden doesn’t stay watered either. And with weeks of 90-degree-plus New Mexico temperatures, not watering isn’t conducive to growth and beauty in a garden. So I pick up the leaves. And I water the garden. Even in the wind while giant cottonwoods continue to gift me with yet more leaves.

My meditation practice, sporadic or not, is never done. If spiritual guidance can’t reach me that way because I’m not sitting in the chair, it finds another way to make its presence known – as toads in the garden. As lucid dreams. Up until now, I have not been a person who remembers dreams. A shift in dream remembering has occurred. How do I know? Three toads told me. They showed up in the garden. The moist, damp environment invited them. Sitting outside, enjoying the garden one night, I noticed a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye. It was a good-sized, well-camouflaged toad that matched the brown bark mulch. I greeted and welcomed him. Later, I noticed two additional, smaller toads. My neighbor, Betsy, the children’s book author with a geologist father and biologist mother, told me two other gardens already have visiting toads. “They like the damp, and cats don’t because they don’t like muddy paws,” she explained, wiggling her fingers. “If you keep your garden damp, neighborhood cats won’t use it as a litter box.” Works for me.

Aware that everything in my life has meaning and happens for a reason, I looked up toads in Animal Speak by Ted Andrews, a reference book on animal symbolism. Toads are amphibians, able to thrive in two worlds, both in water and on land (“amphi” = “double” and “bios” = “life”). Andrews states that from a symbolic aspect, amphibians are “often the keeper of dreams,” associated with lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming; the term was coined by the Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik (Willem) van Eeden. I decided I would like to learn to access spiritual guidance and information from the universe by remembering my dreams. I set a pen and notebook on my nightstand to affirm my decision and to be prepared to capture etheric information before it quickly dissipated back into the nothingness from which it came. Hints started. The first day, I was aware I was dreaming just before I awoke and noticed some details of the dream, but I couldn’t recall them to write them down. The next time, I captured a detail in writing. Today, it took four pages to record the dream. It was about learning, growing and my meditation practice. Lucid dreaming, and writing about it, may become a new spiritual practice for me. The lucid dream took place on the UCLA campus where I was trying to find the room for a final exam in my meditation class. Am I through with meditation? I encountered two other students looking for the same room and expressed my concern that the professor might not let me take the exam since I missed several classes. “What did the class cost you?” they asked. “Worst case is you take it again.”

Are we ever finished? Are the dishes ever permanently clean? Is the gas tank eternally full? Or do we have to keep doing laundry to have clean clothes? An elementary teacher friend came to mind. I remember how incredibly disappointed she was when she realized she would never graduate from her life course in spiritual growth, and it would continue even after her death. If, like everything else, we are indestructible energy, which may change form but continues to exist, then the possibility of ongoing expansion, like that of the universe, exists for us too. The title of the book Chop Wood, Carry Water captures the idea perfectly. Its main thesis is that we chop wood and carry water (do our personal growth work), then we become enlightened (learn who we are), and after that, we chop wood and carry water. Work remains to be done. There are dishes to wash, clothes to clean, an eternal supply of leaves to be picked up, one at a time, in the garden.

Blurbs from the Burque:

•  “New Mexico leads the nation in per capita deaths due to lightning.” (Information posted in the Cibola National Forest exhibit at the top of the Sandia Peak tram). The city of Albuquerque closes public swimming pools as soon as thunderstorms begin. Lifeguards blow a whistle, warning, “Everyone out of the pool!”
• “Lightning activity in New Mexico peaks in July and August (monsoon season) and occurs most commonly between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.” (from energyworks, a brochure from PNM, provider of NM electrical service).