Peaceful poppies

I launched my Poppies for Palestine campaign on my way down South on the train last Thursday morning. I won't ever try and write a newsletter on the train on my phone again if I can help it. It was very tricky and fiddley. The font kept changing itself to ENORMOUS and at one point the words were writing themselves backwards! Somehow, I kept my cool and it was all worth it because the minute I hit 'send' the orders started pouring in.

I was on my way down to meet Agnes Becker of We Are Stardust and see the lovely folks I have met on her Rewild Your Soul course this last year IN REAL LIFE.

We've all been meeting online every other week at our virtual 'campfire' gatherings and hearing about each others landscapes and the adventures we have in them. We had a big walk planned together for the Friday to celebrate Lammas  but on the Thursday afternoon I found myself exploring the countryside around the village of Bromham on my own.

Travel is funny isn't it. In the morning I was in Yorkshire in our green, steep sided  higgledy-piggledy valley and in the afternoon it was all bleached grasses, open sky, cornfields and thatched rooves. It was good to be in a different world.

After a stressful week and a morning of travel and fiddley admin it was good to zone out and feel like I was on holiday. Here I was, alone in a new landscape. What would I see? How would I feel? The undulating flight of a green woodpecker into a distant sycamore tree made me stand still for ages in the hope of seeing it again and it rooted me to the spot and to the moment. I waited behind this big old oak as still as this moth nestling in a crevice, sheltering from the hot afternoon sun. I eventually saw the woodpecker again flying out of the tree, over the juicy blackberry bushes and away into some woodland.  I realised that my breathing and my mind had slowed down. I had stepped into noticing mode.

And here I found all the delicate beauty. I noticed the light on the golden grasses that held all the sun of the season. I saw how green and lush the clump of yarrow looked in comparison.

The yellow tansy was luminous in the sun.

I sat on the path beside it and noticed I wasn't the only one bathing in the yellow glow.

When I stopped to look, I saw that there was some kind of creature on every flower.

When our world is in crisis it's hard to stop and look sometimes. When I see all this beauty and life there is always an ache of sadness close by when I remember that our world leaders have no care whatsoever for the beauty of our world and its creatures. I want to scream, 'BUT LOOK! Look at this beauty. LISTEN to the blackbird singing and the river flowing. LOOK at all these human creatures who just want a peaceful life, who want to share food with their families and smile at the day'.

One day last week I got into a panic. My heart hurt, it was like a physical weight on my chest, not knowing how to find the words or the actions to express the horror of what I was witnessing in Gaza. And Instagram was shouting at me and shaming me for my 'silence' and telling me that this in no uncertain terms meant I didn't CARE! In the midst of this a customer knocked on my studio door 'on the off chance' and I was not really 'there' for her. I could hear words coming out of my mouth but I was locked into my pain. I was, what I call 'stuck in my head.' 

On that day I walked back along the river path but I didn't hear the water or the birds or the wind in the trees, almost all the way home. I was lost in my churning thoughts. But then I had a moment. The late afternoon sun was shimmering in a pattern of dappled light on the trunk of a huge sycamore tree at the edge of the path and it caught my attention. Honestly, the simple beauty of it WOKE ME UP! I stood there for a moment and everything quietened down. I realised that letting Instagram tell me that I didn't care about my fellow human beings and that their suffering was somehow my fault was actually PREPOSTEROUS! I realised that 'silence' could mean a whole host of things, not just ignorance. We don't know the hearts and minds of anyone or the burdens they carry. AND I remembered that there is life outside of Instagram, where real people talk to each other and process their feelings together and figure out their own personal way of speaking to the pain in the world without needing the validation of a social media platform. There was so much noise online and it clearly wasn't serving me because while I was trapped in this headspace I was no longer properly present to the human beings right next to me, let alone the ones far away. I was no longer noticing the immediate world around me. How can I love and care for the world if I'm so stuck in my head that I don't even see it? In that space I was all in a muddle, I couldn't act clearly and honestly.

Oh!

The next step I took along the path was one of peace and power. It was a totally different experience.

The next day I talked through all of this with my Rewild Your Soul group online. These are the kind of conversations we have. They feel important. We talk about how us gentle, sensitive souls can find our voice. About what are own gifts are. About the place where our passions and talents and what the world needs come together in the middle of the Venn diagram. Agnes likened this to a summer meadow when each and every flower or creature has a different job to do and all those jobs make up the whole. We can't be everything doing all jobs.

When we are together we talk about how our paying attention to nature is a gift to the world rather than a luxury or something frivolous in the face of what is going on. We talk about how our attention and gratitude is so needed if we are going to create a more loving world. If we are waiting until there is peace the whole world over before we can stop and appreciate nature and honour it in our lives then we have a problem. Oh wait, we DO have a problem. People have stopped appreciating nature. Our attention has been stolen, we are all stressed out and disconnected, people are at war, there is mass inequality and the world is falling apart. We are looking down at our phones instead of up at the sky. We are dysregulated and we are upset with each other. It's no wonder we are in crisis.

I had started my poppy for Palestine design the week before. At first I thought that the flower that the Palestinians think of as their national flower was the same poppy as the ones that I was seeing here at the edges of these cornfields because I was seeing it pop up in pro-Palestinian artworks, but after finding this article about the Flowers of Gaza which talks about the loss of a once thriving cut flower industry I could see from her photo that it was actually a red anemone. Anemone Corononia, so I had to go back to the drawing board! It was important that it was the right kind of poppy. I didn't want to offend anyone.

In the flow of creativity is a good place to be when you have things to process and think about. You can channel your love and attention into something and it feels healing. And this is MY place, where my passion and talents come together to bring something that might be useful to the world. Sometimes that might look like inspiring people to get outside and notice the beauty, sometimes it might look like bringing people joy with my products. With the poppies it's a way of creating something beautiful with a message of hope and peace attached and each one creates an opportunity for people to share them with their people, to talk about what is happening in Palestine on or off line. And we needed make some money quick!

All the afternoon long as I traversed the field edges, watched birds and sat next to the flowers, my phone was pinging with each and every sale. There were so many. It was so heartening. By the end of the first day my takings were just over £3000...not all profit I might add but it was still a lot!

That is people power! That is thanks to the incredible people on my mailing list who are with me for the journey...and I have to acknowledge it's the power of Instagram too albeit a place or light and dark.

I have to acknowledge the light on the tree that day too. Without that moment I might not have found my way. 

I love the idea of all the poppies hanging up in windows across the world. I've sent them to France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, all over the the U.S and the UK.

Together we are creating a beautiful field of poppies and standing in solidarity with the Palestinians and saying NO! THIS IS NOT OK! NOT IN OUR WORLD! As one of my customers said, "Each one can act as a reminder to show compassion to our fellow human beings".

On Tuesday I paid £3,333 to Medical Aid for Palestinians. That was for the sale of 303 flowers sold from Thursday to Tuesday but the orders are still coming in so there will be more heading their way soon. 

You can order a Poppy Anemone here. When yours arrives in the post please send me a photo of it hanging up and do spread the love. The world needs it. x