The Grow-Light of Love

I started some seeds 3 weeks ago. At first, i put them in a warm place beside the wood stove. (The top of the refrigerator is also an excellent warm place as the heat wafts up from the coils behind the fridge.)

As soon as the seeds sprouted, i moved them to my solarium which has radiant heat in its slate floor. And i strung up fluorescent lights so that they hang just inches above the seedlings. The shop work lights can be found at your local hardware store and are quite inexpensive. What's not cheap are the fluorescent grow-light bulbs ($13 each; 2 per fixture).

When my sweetie helps me string up the lights  (in the solarium in April or storing them by hanging them from the basement ceiling in late May), bulbs tend to roll out of their ballasts and crash to the floor. He and the material world often seem at odds with each other.

We can be at odds with our material form, our very own body. Perhaps we don't like the way it looks. I visited a friend with an auto-immune disease yesterday.

Others of us ignore our body's warning signals and push through. A neighbor had a cardiac arrest at the gym on Friday, which, fortunately, had a defibrillator. He thought he had fainted, and when he "woke up," he thought he was fine and was ready to go home. "Not so fast," said the doctor.

We call it "mind over matter" and think that it's good to get what our master-minds wants by pushing our slave-of-a-body in the direction the master-mind wants it to go--faster, thinner, younger, prettier. We actually do not have that kind of control, but our ego-mind insists on having its way.

Let's grow the seeds of kindness toward ourselves and our bodies. Shine the grow-light of love and acceptance in your own heart.