A poster created by a local The Bread and Puppet Theater that has been active since the 1960s, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.The name Bread & Puppet is derived from the theater’s practice of sharing its own fresh bread with the audience at each performance to create community. Its central principle is that art should be as basic as bread to life. Their print shop creates these beautiful posters.
This poster expresses what happens as we set our intention and attention on someone or something. This dandelion is literally singing its bright yellow joy into the world. All of nature, and that includes our human natures, responds to attention. Whether positive or negative attention, a response is elicited. We blossom in the glow of positive attention, as this dandelion does. Our hearts expand and we drink in words or actions that are directed our way. We know that children flourish under a diet of positive attention and wither under the weight of negative attention.
With attention being such a powerful thing, it behooves us to feel into our intentions behind our giving of attention. When we get up in the morning, what is our intention for our day? When we share something with someone, what is our intention? With this on my mind, I discovered that I had shared something recently without thinking of my intention in doing so. It was information about a mutual acquaintance and it was received in the vein of gossip. As I reviewed my day, it stood out in a glaring light. My intention was not clear. Had I stopped to feel what my intention was, before sharing, I would not have shared. Clarity about intention forces you to feel if and when to share some information.
My intention each morning, is to be uplifting to all whom I meet, to be a force of love in this world. Gossip does not uplift, does not ennoble. Neither does judgment of self or others. If I desire to uplift and be love, I need to have the intention to treat myself, as well as others, with love and care.
With this new focus heightened, I was amazed at the number of times that I acted or spoke without being clear as to my intention behind the words or action. This woke me up in a new way. My intention is to be conscious and clear all the time. It is difficult to do! I find myself slipping into unconsciousness much more frequently than I thought. With my attention now turned to my intentions, I get a quick jolt of a reminder when I am veering off my intended path of love.
For the most part, my intention is to be love and my attention follows as I focus on the beauty that abounds around me. This realization came home to me almost two decades ago when I took a trip to India after signing my divorce papers. The man who taught me a yoga meditation course, gave me a huge blessing. After our last meditation experience together where we traveled out into the cosmos, he looked at me and said, “You are a force of love in this world.”
Those words changed my life as they rang true in every cell of my body. All the shame and guilt that I had wrapped around me like a heavy cloak, woven of my decision to end my twenty-five year marriage, slipped off my shoulders in that moment. I had been loving. I had been loving!
I had tried a hundred different ways to assist my then husband out of his addictions until the most loving thing I could do, was to leave. Years later, he thanked me for having the courage to leave him. To force him choose a new path. To allow new growth.
There is so much of life waiting for our attention. Let us shower the trees, the birds, the children, our mother earth, one another and ourselves most of all, with an intention to be loving. As we give love our attention, it grows and fills more and more of our world. We are love. Love is the most powerful and expansive force on the planet. With it, we can light up this world and create heaven on earth.