Someone Else’s Hand

May 11, 2022

One of the things I’m aware that my soul is working on is being willing to ask for help. To be open to accepting assistance. This comes up regularly in my everyday life, seemingly as often as it always has. The only difference now is I’m aware of when I put up barriers to receiving help. 

It’s not always about requesting others’ assistance. It could be asking my Higher Self and my body for direction with things like, should I take this supplement? Should I do this exercise? My soul always knows, but I might not receive accurate information or benevolent assistance if I neglect the crucial, free-will step of actually asking the question or making the request. 

Every once in awhile, some task or project is so blatantly beyond my capability, asking for help is the only smart choice. Even then, it can take me a long time to reach out.

*****

When we had the yard renovated, a process which was largely completed in December 2020, I congratulated myself: great! No more biweekly gardener upkeep, no more grass to try to keep healthy and weed-free. It seemed wise and ecologically friendly to refrain from replacing the long-dead lawn with high-maintenance, water-guzzling new sod, and install drought-tolerant, low-maintenance landscaping instead. I was confident I could keep up with snipping a few dead blossoms and pulling the occasional weed that braved its way through the mulch.

A year and a half later, I’ve conceded defeat. The weeds don’t care that there’s mulch. The gophers run rampant under the backyard lawn–replacement Dymondia. The exuberant pink valerian that seeded itself into a gorgeous meadow beneath the avocado tree requires ongoing labor to deadhead and weed, something I’m not capable of right now.

So it’s back to biweekly maintenance. I bless our longtime landscapers and bow to the inevitable.

*****

It’s the day after the first scheduled gardeners’ maintenance. Lucky timing. The stake holding the fledgling crape myrtle tree snapped in the high wind sometime during the night and the tree was canting sideways. I managed to prop it with a ladder, but there was no way I could pound in a new stake. It took two of them to do the job, one holding the tree straight, the other siting the stake and pounding it in with a brick. Together, they tied the tree to the stake with cushioned wire and now it holds its own against the wind.

Today, I feel nothing but gratitude for these two sturdy, experienced men, one a young, newer hire, the other a middle-aged fellow who’s worked here off and on for years.

I don’t think either of them speaks English. We got along with my limited vocabulary, hand gestures, nodding and head shakes and many smiles. We understood one another with perfect amity, and today the beautiful results of their work brings a lump of gratitude to my throat.

When I think of the spaceships landing—or more likely decloaking—I wonder if I would feel something similar? There are so many situations on Planet Earth where I feel that we humans stand helplessly looking on, knowing that the right individual with the right tools could repair and replace and renew anything broken or lacking, up to and including our garbage-clogged oceans and chemically polluted skies. But we don’t have access to those large-scale, high tech tools.

Sovereignty is necessary, a birthright, our true natural human state. The limits that accompany incarnating as human are legion, though. Whether those limits are artificially imposed by others who wish to control and use us, or are inherent in our physical 3D makeup, is something I don’t want to judge. Perhaps it’s a mix of both, the combination of which helped create what many call the schoolhouse of Planet Earth.

If one of the lessons we are to master while attending this enormous learning experience called Earth is that when we need help, we may—we must—ask for it, I feel my garden is teaching me well.

And when those ships decloak, I hope I remember to open my heart so that whatever plea is in there can fly free. There’s no shame or defeat in asking for benevolent assistance which is freely and lovingly provided. And perhaps, for all I know, divinely foreordained.