Life Gardening
Where you cultivate personal
growth, happiness, creativity, wisdom,
love, self confidence, self esteem, success,
balance, and wholeness of being
with Jim Downton
Rich possibilities for changing your life exist in every part of the garden. Search around for what you need. Turn your visit into a mind-altering experience!
Under Categories, Visit Books of Change–self-help books I’ve written to support people who want to increase their happiness, enhance their creativity, deepen their wisdom, and cultivate greater peace of mind.
Just released! Today, I Will . . .Words to Inspire Positive Life Changes (Blue Mountains Arts, 2009) asks you to shift the way the think and to cultivate your amazing potential. Using declarations, each containing the words “I will,” the book helps you focus on what’s positive and good in your life. It steers you onto a path of self-improvement, inspiring you to be the person you’ve always wanted to be–one day at a time.
This inspirational book will make a great gift for someone you care about.
To buy the book, go to Amazon.com. Click on “Books” and then search for the title, Today, I Will.
Awakenings inspire new ways of thinking and living, so happiness, wisdom, and creativity grow. Changing weekly, these words of affirmation create positive life changes.
Words to Inspire Personal Change create shifts in the way we think and live.
Tiny Poems are haiku I’ve written on various themes, including courage, life, love, and spirit.
Tombstone Epitaphs give you a new perspective on your life.
If you enjoy art, visit the Art Gallery where you can view my abstract, playful, symbolic, and realistic paintings.
By deepening your awareness, making new choices, and adding new ways of thinking, you will transform how you live. Like gardening in your yard, the inner work take effort and patience, but the results make it worthwhile.
As the Woo Master says:
“Life gardening is a good reason to live.
With care, blossoms will come.”
Happy Life Gardening,
Jim
The Foolish seek happiness in the distance.The wise grow it under their feet
Bloom Where You Are PlantedMakes sense, no? I can’t seem to get that together. I am a transplanted New Yorker, living in South Florida. It was my idea. It seemed like a good idea at the time for a number of reasons. Then again, even as I was planning my move, packing up my home, I had a feeling of foreboding. It was more than sadness.
After two years, Fl still is not home. I still am a stranger. I have not even allowed myself to explore outside of my immediate area. We cannot always choosewhere we live, and we cannot control the exact circumstances of our lives, our health, our work or our family challenges. We can, however, choose our reaction to them. In gardening terms, we can choose to bloom where we are planted. Or, we can choose to resist and mentally or verbally protest our circumstances, which results in our unhappiness and a failure to thrive. Your reaction is your choice. I have reacted poorly.
There are two layers in the interpretation you can apply to “bloom where you are planted”. First is the physical “garden” you find yourself planted in, such as geographic region which I have already described. More importantly
is the interior garden we find ourselves planted in – the suffering or lack thereof that we experience. The two layers, at least in my personal situations go hand in hand. They play upon each other. Many of us deal with chronic health issues or pain, while others grapple with inner demons of unhappiness, depression, low self-worth, and loneliness. Our backgrounds and circumstances most certainly influence who we are, but we (I) are responsible for whom I(we) become.
I love to garden. It relaxes me. It gives me pleasure to see something I alone created, bloom (ok nature had a part in it). It would give me a sense of nurturing and complete happiness, to pick the fresh vegetables for a salad, or simply to pick some flowers to put in a vase, or look out over what would become the sweetest garden on the block. I became quite the “expert” and people would seek, and I gladly gave my advice. The first time I planted a garden, I had no idea what to expect, if anything. I sowed the seeds, and one day, miraculously it happened. They bloomed. It was spectacular. I was thoroughly amazed and could not believe I could create something of such beauty. I love the entire planting process from beginning to end. I’m not afraid of getting dirty. I loved rolling around in the dirt. I even like pulling weeds. It’s work you don’t have to think about, and so it quiets my mind and allows me to de stress.
Why then, am I finding this so difficult? I’ve told myself over and over that this period will “come to pass”. I wish I could weather the times of suffering better. At this stage of my life I thought I’d have a better grasp of my life. I think it’s just the opposite, I am losing my grasp.
It is all up to me. I am my own garden. I must bloom in this garden in which I was planted or I will die. Remind myself, and acknowledge and honor my true self . Feed, water, nurture and let the sun shine upon myself. Be kind to myself and pay more attention to Max.
I am my own garden. That is how to bloom where you are planted.