To Clutter is Human, to Cultivate is Divine

We can either clutter our life or cultivate it. And by cultivating it I don’t mean going to the symphony or reading great literature though those things can help. To cultivate our life is to spend time alone and discover what is there. What do we think and feel? What do we want from life? How do we affect life and how does it affect us?
 
The inner and outer worlds are not two separate things. They are intricately intertwined. As you spend time with yourself, your thoughts and feelings, you’ll come to see that this is true. It’s really just as important to cultivate relationships and work you love. To ignore one affects the other. Focus too much out there and you begin to lose yourself. Become too self-absorbed and your outer world shrinks. As materialism rose, the inner life got pushed to the side. We began to focus on immediate gratification without any self-reflection.
 
What happened is we began to clutter our lives, both inner and outer. Cultivation itself became ignored. We became consumers no longer the gardeners of our lives.
 
To live a mythopoeic life is to understand that everything matters. To leave materialism behind is to make matter matter from the inside out, and this takes cultivation. It takes time to see the essence of all things and beings, to realize we are all one as well as unique individuals. It is both inner and outer work. It takes no time at all to consume, but to cultivate our lives, it takes eternity. It is not something we ever finish. It is becoming, a flowering into an ever greater sense of being.
 
The ancients understood all is connected. The principle of correspondence in the hermetic tradition states, “As is above, so is below.  As is below, so is above.” Hermes Trismegistus also stated “…as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…” 
 
When we cultivate our inner and outer lives we are living by this principle. To live this way brings balance to our lives and so to the world around us. Cultivate a life that moves the world and you’ll find you are ever more moved by the world. You are a gardener not a blind consumer. Remove the clutter and unearth the rich soil of your soul, work and relationships. It is here you plant the seeds of a meaningful life. It is from here the world becomes a garden again.