Great Spirit’s Garden-Daily Meditation June 16, 2022

Today’s Quotation:

We are all flowers in the Great Spirit’s garden.  We share a common
root, and the root is Mother Earth.  The garden is beautiful
because it has different colors in it, and those colors
represent different traditions and cultural backgrounds.-Grandfather David Monongye (Hopi)

Today’s Meditation:

Using the image of flowers as a metaphor for our diversity as people is very fitting.  Flowers are very beautiful, and much of what makes them so is the way that their contrasts stand out so strongly.  We don’t tend to judge flowers so harshly for not being a particular color or for having a distinct shape (although as human beings we do have the tendency to like or dislike particular flowers, as opposed to just accepting them for what they are).

The garden of life is beautiful.  The garden of humans is also beautiful– we have all shapes, sizes, colors, and behaviors to see every day of our lives.  We have beautiful faces and unique faces that have a beauty all their own, if we choose to notice them and accept them.  Our garden is also blessed with sound, and the voices that we hear are as varied as the faces themselves, and our garden is also blessed by a rich diversity in the artistic and logical expression.

We have been blessed with a richer garden than we ever could have dreamed up for ourselves, and this blessing is something that we, unfortunately, tend to take for granted.  Can you walk by the most beautiful garden in the world without taking a good look at the riches that it holds?  I didn’t think so–I know that I couldn’t do so.  Most of us, though, don’t recognize the beauty of the garden of the people we are a part of, for we’ve seen it so often that we don’t notice it anymore.

How poor we are, in the midst of great riches, if we don’t see and understand the wealth that is all around us, all the time.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Why do prejudices and biases against other people tend to come up?

2.  If you could change one thing in the garden of people, what would it be?

3.  Why do we tend to be blind to the beauty of the diversity of the world?

For further thought:

Just imagine how boring life would be if we were all the same.
My idea of a perfect world is one in which we really appreciated
each other’s differences:  short, tall; Democrat, Republican;
black, white; gay, straight–a world in which all of us
are equal, but definitely not the same.-Barbra Streisand