The Willow Made Me
I had intentions of doing paperwork—you know sorting through the bills and donation requests, the coupons we will never use and by now have expired but for a moment in time we thought we should create a budget and try to save a little money, type paperwork—instead I wound up at Home Depot only to discover the most amazing Dappled Willow Shrub in need of a good home. She looked desperate, so I loaded her into my car, forgot the reason I was there and spent the entire afternoon digging around roots and clearing sod to squeeze her in. The truth was I did not need her, my yard did not need her, and my schedule did not need her, but I LOVE her!
One of the breaks in the paperwork sorting I had planned, was to write a blog on accountability, but you can see why I didn’t, right? What kind of boring must I be to write about accountability while we are celebrating warm days, occasional rain, new plant life, wild babies everywhere, etc. I was grateful for the diversion of Home Depot and upon completion of my Willow planting I looked up her plant medicine. I wished to know why my eyes were mysteriously drawn to her feathery variegated delicate leaves of shades of light pink, white and green. Guess what? The plant medicine for Willow is none other than accountability, prescribed to people who like to blame. Who me? Haha! Do you not love this world and being beaten over the head with a message even when you are trying to bury your head in the… sod? (Is that what the British mean by calling someone a sod?) I know just the person to ask.
Because I do not get out of it, you don’t either. I am going to hold you accountable to explore accountability. Let’s get this accountability blog over with shall we?
It has become fashionable to think of ourselves as accountable, and a bit cliché to blame the dynamics of…(fill in the type of relationship), to someone’s lack of accountability. The key word in this sentence is “blame.” I learned from a friend that basically anytime we find ourselves complaining, we are blaming, and thus not accountable. See, for the longest time I thought I was being accountable by pointing out the inherent character flaws in… fill in the blank relationship. I thought complaining was justified when you definitely had something to complain about, which is a certain absurd level of thinking, but take it up a notch and you distill the spiritual, and thus challenging level of accountability. You know the saying, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem,” well, along with reducing complaining try using this adage as a guiding principle, everywhere. What would it be like to actually contribute to the solution? Beware: just because you are not complaining outwardly does not mean you are not entertaining nastiness in private. I have tried that one, too.
People who do not make a habit of complaining do not necessarily have less to complain about, until they do…and that is how it works. First we learn to moan and groan because it makes us feel important to have something really poopy happen to us (notice the language of the victim) but eventually we tire of feeling poopy and realize we have the capacity to transmute the habitual attraction to negative vibes and happenings simply by becoming accountable, capital A. Freedom due to the empowerment of Accountability!
I know it appears that I have this all figured out, but just today I was blaming Home Depot’s clever placement of desperate Willows and thus making me spend my afternoon on an inessential—now I am grateful to have Ms. Dapple staring at me from the backyard as an eternal reminder of the magic in this practice and I can attest that I have less poop sandwich days than ever before. Something is working!