Respect your own handcrafted meaning…

There’s a plot of land inside your skull.
It is small and yours.
Touch it, feel the pulse of rain and sun.
You may think it’s too simple for a proper garden.
That wealth or fame won’t root there.
These are horizon thoughts.
The horizon is not your home.
This is.
Tend the garden.

Often, we hear that to be the hero of our own story is to seek praise and increasingly complex forms of ownership. We hear this from people who need us to participate in this shared fiction, either to validate their own participation or because they want to sell us something.

Yet, again and again we see that those who gain wealth or fame must wrestle with the sobering truth that external validation does not change the fundamental fact that we all live within our own internal gardens accompanied by whatever we’ve coaxed to grow there.

Respect the peace you grant freely to yourself.
Respect your own handcrafted meaning.
Respect the intimate comfort of small pleasures.
Respect simple consistency over grand intensity.
Respect the bedrock truth that your worth is not tied to your possessions or achievements.

And also this:

Moss is 300 million years old.
It is at home on every continent.
No roots. No towering trunks,
yet it tasted the air before the first feather,
before shrews stirred the leaf litter.
When your mind hisses like a kettle,
look to your elder, to the green lessons
of soft, simple quiet beneath the sun.

~The Cryptonaturalist