annewalshcoach - bring your best self to light

The Nature environment or ragwort, flowers and why there are no live fat flying birds...
I was supposed to write this note yesterday but found that when I sat down to write it, I found myself feeling bored and restless and what I wrote was rubbish. So I decided to leave it and found myself awake at 4.30 am buzzing with ideas about this piece. This incident brought me up smack against one of the first things we can observe about Nature.
Things have timing
By and large all organisms have their own time line...whether we like it or not and generally our life goes more smoothly when we honour that. So what project have you got that you find yourself struggling with? Does the time structure you have decided should fit with it actually reflect its reality. It's great to say write a book in 90 days but is the reality for YOU that it's more like 90 weeks...and that's what it will take for you to do the work that truly reflects your intention?
Where's your pride?
Are you hanging out with lions or donkeys? Or who is in your herd?
There are few things lonelier than hanging out with the wrong herd. And few things more reassuring and comforting than finding those people that you say to (a lá CS Lewis) "what, you too!". But that means first of all admitting that you are in the wrong herd for you...and secondly identifying where you can find your herd (or what Martha Beck calls "your team"). So where can you find more like minded people to hang out with? This doesn't mean you won't mix with other species...but you'll have a place to go when you need to just be a lion instead of a donkey.
Ragwort is toxic for horses but they don't go on about it.
Ragwort is a toxic weed for horses (but not for all animals) but horses just avoid eating it unless there is absolutely nothing else. They usually don't go around wringing their hands (or hooves) wishing ragwort would change or raging against their own digestive system because it's poisonous for them. They just don't eat it. What ragwort do you need to stop eating ?
Don't just grow, evolve. Or move from leaf to flower .
In the opening pages of Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" he describes the evolution of the first flower and how flowers have inspired humans ever since. So if you have an ongoing struggle/stuckness in an aspect of your life or business...what would be a totally new direction to take it in? Instead of growing more leaves...what would a bloom look like? For example, Henry Ford didn't invent a faster horse, he came up with the motor car which still has the shadow its origins as a horse carriage
There are no (live) fat flying birds
We have a bird feeder outside our kitchen window and I love watching all the different species show up and watching how they even eat differently. Sparrows seem to have a feeding frenzy and then disappear. The blue tits come, fastidiously take one seed and fly off. Finches let the sparrows do all the work and then pick the seeds off the ground. None of these birds are fat though. Flying is very energy intensive but must be balanced with having a body that's light enough to lift. So what do you need to do less of in order to fly?
Surprising fuel sources
The land where I live is very boggy and acidic and one of the plants that has evolved to thrive in this environment is the Venus fly trap. This plant cannot get sustenance from the usual source i.e. soil so it has evolved to get nourishment from what comes into its orbit i.e. flies. So if you can't get the fuel you need now...what would be a surprising source?
If your work was a star, what would it look like light years from now?
One of the things that fascinates me about the stars is that they are so far away that the light we are seeing from them now left thousands of light years ago. In fact those stars might already have exploded by the time we see them. We are constantly reaping the benefits of work done by people hundreds of years ago (many of them are anonymous). Witness our churches, great buildings, beautiful clothes, works of art, literature, the technology we depend on. These wonderful things evolved from the work of people who came before them. So if you were doing work that you intended to last for thousands of years, even if it's anonymous..what would you do differently or the same?

So my challenge to you this week is take a problem to Nature. If you have something that you are stuck on, why not just park it and look to Nature for inspiration. It may be that you can't get out to spend time in a forest...but you could always watch the Discovery Channel or David Attenborough...:-)

Last week I wrote about the financial environment Financial environmentand Karen Vizer wrote about the
Environment of Self . We will be writing about the other environments over the coming weeks.
If you would like to hear a recording that gives an overview of all the environments we have identified.
Check this out: http://ping.fm/AuHud
10 environments recording
Thanks for your time and as always, comments, suggestions and observations are most welcome!