I’ve long admired the worldview of the farmer. 

I have been greatly blessed by applying the principles every farmer lives by and knows for sure to my own, decidedly digital, decidedly city mouse life.

Principles like:

• Everything in life is seasonal. Planting, or harvesting or cultivating. There’s a season for these things. 

• Everything comes to an end. That is natural and necessary, not a catastrophe to be avoided at all costs. When you know that endings are normal and healthy, you don’t fear beginning as much.

• Prune what isn’t flourishing, so that it can’t drain resources from the optimal growth that wants to happen. 

• Growth takes the time it takes. 

• Growth is a co-creative process with the rain, the sun, the soil… and the Divine. You just play your role.

• Don’t be productive. Be fruitful. 

These are just a few of the lessons that I’ve learned and taught from trying on the lens of a farmer, over and over, over the years.

And any single one of the above principles is a whole entire sermon for somebody reading or listening to or watching this today. 

But last week, I learned about another principle from farming that landed with the ‘chink’ of inner resonance when I heard it (from Brad Dieter).

This principle comes specifically from the work of bamboo farmers, and uses bamboo as a model for how we grow, in business and in life.  

Apparently, bamboo can grow 90 feet in sixty days. 

This is a plant, y’all. And it grows to the height of a nine story building… in two months. 

There’s just one thing you need to know to understand this seemingly supernatural, very natural phenomenon. 

The farmers who tend this varietal of bamboo water every single seed for three years before it begins to shoot up. 

Three years.

And during those three years there is an entire work being done unseen in the ground. There’s an entire root structure and infrastructure that is being built and being formed and growing and being established that you can’t even see from above the surface.

They’re bamboo farmers. 

So they know what’s happening beneath the surface.

They know and trust in the natural order and divine timing of things.

They don’t get impatient and try planting kale instead.

They don’t give up and stop watering.

They don’t dig up the seed, deem it a failure and toss it in the garbage.

They just keep watering.

They keep tending. 

They keep trusting. 

They keep letting time, the sun and the soil collaborate and co-create with them.

And that’s a word for those of us who have businesses, dreams, goals and visions and even just best life goals, self care goals, self actualization calling to us with increasing urgency and resonance. 

Overnight success is possible.

It just takes a few years. Or a few decades of cultivation.

It takes trust. 

It takes patience.

It takes the sovereignty to stay in your zone of genius and keep watering your dream, your vision, your goal, your calling when the people keep asking you when the fruit is gonna show up.

And… if the dream or vision is big the more it takes cultivating your dream and the team. So you’ll have to do whatever inner work you, personally, need to do in order to attract, inspired and lead and activate a team to help you build the vision.

If the dream or vision is big… it will require you to plant seeds, water, weed, prune and cultivate your own inner landscape.

You’ll have to shed what no longer serves you along the way.

You’ll have to shine light on your own self-sabotage and to begin gracefully deciding to stop giving in to the urge to retreat on the verge of your breakthroughs. 

You’ll have to see what needs seeing within you.

And you’ll have to stop overruling and overriding your own inner wisdom and guidance to please others or protect yourself from feeling exposed and vulnerable, which is how answering your callings makes you feel (at first).

Brilliant One, whatever your personal seeds of genius and greatness happen to be, please keep watering your bamboo.

Head up + heart out,

P.S.: My Sacred Money Archetypes® program is now enrolling. It’s for spiritual entrepreneurs and leaders who want to do their inner work and stop sabotaging their own business, income or career goals. 

It’s also perfect for anyone on a journey of spiritual and psychological maturity who simply wants to take a deep dive into understanding their unique gifts, talents and self-limiting patterns so they can reach more of their potential.

For a few more days, I’m offering this $749 program to Transformation Tuesday readers for $197. 

<<< Click here to learn more about my Sacred Money Archetypes® program.

P.P.S.: There’s a whole book and movement on this bamboo principle. Check it out:

Water The Bamboo: Unleashing The Potential Of Teams And Individuals by Greg Bell

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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