The importance of things

There are two ways this blog is asking to start, and two thoughts jostling each other for expression. I will allow my fingers to decide.

I have been guilty…starts one, and it is a train of thought that seems surprisingly like repentance.

I have an embroidered piece…starts another, and there is a memory of never-experienced events that it leads to.

Both thoughts lead to the same point : the importance  – dare I say it? Of THINGS. Material things. Things you can touch but that cannot touch you. That you can feel about, but which possibly have no feelings about you. That you can want, but go to the one with not only want but also the one who takes the actions required to acquire them. Things that you dream of acquiring but I doubt are dreaming of being owned by you.

I am talking, surprisingly, about the tables and chairs, knick-knacks, clothes,  tech toys and other items that make our life on earth colorful.

Those who know me well, will be surprised as I am usually not one to care about possessions. The only thing I want to upgrade, is consciousness – not my kitchen. What I want to own is knowledge,  not  be owned by things, which is why I fight whenever my darling one would get me a thing as a present. Ah yes, this is where the tide turns.

Conventional wisdom has it that the things we own, own us. You buy something, then need to insure it. To do that, you need money. To get that, you need to work. To work, you need to get skills and knowledge. So, here is a cycle that starts with you and ends with you but you see where it is going.

So here is something that I am told belonged to a grandmother. It is not ‘just’ a thing, because when I think of it, or see it, I remember one whom I never met, who I can imagine painstakingly embroidering yards of velvet ribbon that I can decorate a saree with. I would not want to cut it because she chose the size, and – you understand. Aspects of her presence are there, long long after she has passed away – one that even my mother has no awareness of.  As her memory fails, my mother never fails to smile at one of the few things she has that belonged to her mother. Another embroidered piece. ‘That was made by my mother,’ she says, and there is that lingering sadness at the mother who died soon after childbirth, along with I imagine, a sense of belonging, of being loved, of that certain something that only a mother can give.

Our Mother Earth and Mother Nature, with all the elements presence here, give us not only each other but also all the things that are in our world. The atomic structure of the universe that is present within us, is also within the things, albeit expressed differently. So the years I have spent disdaining things are years I needed to see instead the thought, feeling, action that are infused in them. From outer space, there is nothing much to distinguish me from the things around me. That is the essence of Gaia. The people and things that are on our planet, are all in one system. We are interlinked with vibrations visible and subtle.

They say a crystal chooses you. That if you lose one, it chooses who it wants to go to. Perhaps that is in fact, the nature of all things. Perhaps there is a choice at an atomic level,  one that we are unable to know but we can sense.

There was a time when we needed to raise our vibration by moving our attention away from material things. To move towards matters of spirit.

So, I have been guilty of not always acknowledging the importance of things, but I am grateful that I have always sensed the love with which even   ‘store-bought food’  or a pin has been prepared. It doesn’t  matter to me if the person who is working in a factory, big or small, is aware of that love. But it is there. Even when it is made by a machine made by  another machine made by a person.

Love is there.

It is time now, to raise our consciousness that within all things and beings is a vibration of the highest order. This is Gaia.

~ meenakshi