A Tradition of Tea Ceremony: An Invitation to Love

Love is what the universe offers and the sweet joy of a cup of tea how we receive. We are returning to the garden for a magical gathering among the trees, plants and loving powers of spirit with pots of delicious tea, ceremony and friendship. It's time for the divine love and wisdom of a tea circle. We will be hosting an in-person tea circle in the BirdHouse community garden, which will occur in the shadow of this year’s autumn equinox. with Jessica D. Perez, Director of Ed. Development at the BirdHouse representing the community apothecary.

You're Invited for Tea

The BirdHouse Community Apothecary

Invites you to the

AUTUMN EQUINOX TEA CIRCLE & POTLUCK

Sunday, September 19, 2021

11 a.m. - 2 p.m.

In celebration of this important shift in Gaia’s cycle, we will be sitting in circle, while we sip and meditate with three teas and plant allies who will help us delve into the harvest of our imaginations and the roots of our dreams, as we move into a darker, more fertile time of the year.

Bring your favorite Tea Cup as we honor the Fall Equinox. We will feat. three teas; Passion flower tea to invite our hearts to open, wild cherry and rose for nourishment and Egyptian Blue Lotus for connection.

Our intention for this and every tea circle, is to nurture the inspiration that springs from our mutual exploration into the magnificent world of plants. We hope to create a safe space where we serve, care for, love, support and guide each participant to the plants that may help to unearth their own self-healing ability and deepen their connection to themselves, local community and the natural world. We will end our time together with a delicious potluck and a number of nourishing stories to be remembered and retold for days to come. Email Jessica for details.

**This event is for members of the BirdHouse** CLICK HERE to become a member for as little as $2 per month!

What to Bring:

1. Please bring a floor cushion, pillow or mat to sit on. The BirdHouse will have foldable chairs available for those who may have back problems and cannot sit on the floor for long periods of time.

2. A tea cup. You’re favorite, if you’d like.

3. Journal and writing instrument. Colors, markers, paints optional.

4. An edible item and/or dish to share with about 5 - 6 people. The BirdHouse will have water, tea (of course!) and some light refreshments. We will have access to a small kitchen, in case some potluck items need to be reheated.

Our Time Together:

11:00 a.m. Arrival, Welcome & Mini Tour of the BirdHouse Garden

11: 45 a.m. Land Acknowledgement

12 p.m. Tea Circle Introductions

12:15 p.m. Tea Circle Visualization, Meditation & Group Sharing

1:30 p.m. Close Circle

1:35 p.m. Communi-Tea Potluck

2 p.m. Good-bye and may we merry meet again!

Registration Fees:

Seedling ($11) – For members who are experiencing financial instability and who are presently unable to unfurl and establish their firm roots in the ground.

Budding ($22) – For members who are experiencing financial stability and who have taken in enough water, minerals and sunlight to provide shade for a fellow Seedling.

Fruiting ($44) – For members who are experiencing financial abundance and who have harvested enough fruits from their labor, to help cultivate an ecosystem of care.

Pics and Video from The BirdHouse Community Apothecary Medicine Making Day ❤️

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

The BirdHouse is a community garden in Hollywood, serving as a hub of exchange for those attracted to caring for the land and people, through arts and ecology. Our purpose is to engage each other in finding creative solutions to the most pressing issues of our times. Through permaculture, systems thinking, medicinal plants, art, singing, science and storytelling, we aspire to a new story of interdependence, to restore shared wisdom, and to have fun doing it.

Mels Love Land is a place to for love activism. We tell stories to heal perceptions. We co-create media, collaborating with a collective of heart centered artists to transform the worlds we live in.

Please connect, share, join us, we are here for love. ---

Melanie Lutz – Mels Love Land

All Systems Love

Writer/Producer/Love Activist

WHAT IF

all our thoughts

were loving. . .

consider the possibility

Instagram:

@MelsLoveLand

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MelsLoveLand

Website:

https://www.melsloveland.com

Love is Ever Present

And now, and now, and now. “We arrive were we start. A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.“ Re-sharing the words of TS Eliot wrapped in the dreams of peace and a deeply held return to love from his later in life poem, Little Gidding, the fourth and final piece in his Four Quartets that ends with these words, of entering the garden through the unremembered gate where all is well and all shall be well lit the way to remembering the care and work necessary to realize the dreams as the wishes of the heart.

The opening lines from Mels Love Land: Consider the Possibility There is Another Way opens into the the idea of love in full presence. A remembering of what is always available.

It is not a place you can go to on a map. It is an experience of yourself within, an experience of deep and abiding peace of mind, body and spirit, a place where you wake up in full joy of your being and fully participate in every process of life enraptured in the sacredness of your truest home, that space where love and forgiveness meets an open heart becoming a soulful force of nature. - Mels Love Land

When you begin to contemplate a love of place in connection to the soul you understand how quickly the electricy of the moment unfolds with each beat of the heart and each breathe filling up our pulmonary roots system that which breaths us in connection to all that is. The movement of our cells, our essence and our vibration of wholeness in the collecitve conversations. When we cultivate love we co-create a conversation with all that is. We become a vessel of nourishment at once traveling through the river of life and a part of the vast encounter of the sea establishing relationship with all that is. Like many things in my life, the more you read, experience and love, the deeper and deeper your connection to all that is unfolds, beautifully.

It's true, the core of this loving offering, is to enter the world as nourishment and a beacon of light filled energy to translate the timelines, to c0-create deeper connection and to . The vast inter-relating worlds that exist in each moment. It is said in many texts and traditions handed down through ancestral lineages and shared through the artistic expression, our God essence, our beingness intersects with the whole in the present moment. Call it the Power of Now, the Holy Instant, the intersection of light as the life we choose to live. Everything that ever existed, now exists, available, at one, in the present loving moment. It is why when I say. "Now. Now. Now." It is an invitation, a spell, a casting to liberate my thinking and be, in this moment. With this loving now, in love, you are disconnected from the past, in this love, you have freed up the future to be something different, and seeded this moment, this present moment, with this power, this grace, this open heart, every possibility, every availablility to your soul's complete fulfilment. In this now, now, now, in love- you are all. You are the intended and the expected, you are whole, enough and held in the eternity of peace. Complete.

And now, and now, and now. “We arrive were we start. A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything..“ sharing the words of TS Eliot wrapped in the dreams of peace and a return to love from his final quartet. t I was enough. That the love I was extending and experiencing, that expansion of mine into the collective heart would create deeper and deeper levels of peace and understanding, decoding all the ongoing messages and relating a life to its origins and healing all ancestrial lineage onward into a healed and whole earth. That 'the inner and outer self would be as one' as Marcus Auerilious spoke of. Not feel as one, be as one. Be. The beingness of selfhood. The knowing of place, purpose and the collective heart moving as one. I had hope love would lead the way to everywhere I wanted to be. I had faith love would be the never ending bridge full of happiness, courage and collaboration to explore, regenerate and uplift the ways and work and care necessary for everyone to thrive. The vastness of love as a to Ic, a feeling, an experience and the binding electricty to the entirty of the universe is how we arrrive where we start. How I came into the center of my being to read through the energetic aliveness of love.

And now, and now, and now. We enter the divine love and wisdom of the garden.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

The source of information and inspiration for Mels Love Land comes from Theologian, Scientist, Philosopher and Mystic Emanuel Swedenborg who lived and worked in the 17th Century. It arrived in the empty spaces, the void that sometimes followed a successful book store reading of my original memoir, a written self portrait, The Bare Melcessities: Walking Out. Waking Up. Getting Bare. at the wonder filled spaces of The Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles, California. One of his books, Emanuel Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom jumped off the shelf and fell at my feet. It was an awakening moment for me, I opened it and found the first pages sharing his drawing of a cherubic angel watering a roman garden with the latin phrase Cura Et Labore (with care and work.) 'Yes.' I said to myself. This is it. We tend to our garden's through care and work. This work, shared his philosophy on the relationship to the garden and its wisdom in returning us to love. In it he touched on his own breakthrough, where Angels visited him, sharing a light language, a decoding of the christic messages from the bible struck a chord deep within me. What I would later understand in my own research and compassionate positioning, each of us must untangle, decode the confinement of our childhoood religious teachings, weed back the doctrine, unrelated to the light of understanding. In this book I saw a kindred spirit whose work would shift all that would follow.

cherubic angel watering a roman garden with the latin phrase Cura Et Labore

Emanuel Swedenborg's experiences culminated in a "spiritual awakening" in which he received a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write The Heavenly Doctrine to reform Christianity opening into the wisdom of the heavenly mysteries. His insights would take root in the hearts of many types of artisans, engineers, city planners, landscape artchitects and builders allowing for the incorporation of divine love and wisdom into the spaces they regenerated, co-createed and planned for. In an interesting fun fact, Swederborg's work was a gateway for the restoration of Chicago after the great fire of 1817, ushering in an era of beautiful cities and when completed became the space that hosted the introduction of Yoga to the West via a 1933 visit by Yogananda Parmahansa to address the World Fellowship of Faiths at the Second Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair held at the Morrison Hotel on “Realizing World Unity Through the Art of Living.”

The idea of a spiritual breakthrough, a vistitation that cracks open the dream within the dream and lays bare the reality of the world a blessing of truth to what remains in the center and knows. A way to understand the knowings that came easy to me. A way of envisioning all I experience and regulating its possibilities. Swedenborg was given insights, to seeing with a vision of the heart with light keys into the the Christic 'light' of the universe as spoken through Angels in their Angelic language, a language he described as light language. Through this light language, he received a flood of information and a powerful intersection of all the teachings, wisdom and possibilities his exploration of life had born. As I delved into the practice of seeing the world through a key light system and how this informed my place in it through the metaphor of a garden of possibilities everything shone with a clarity of purpose. If tended the weeds and the worry, the loss and the blooms, the vibrancy of tone and the shrill scratches with love, all would be well and would reveal all the necessities of life that was my birthright. This blessing of a decoder of all source material, created from the space of love as a unifier with all other source material became a resting place, a place to return and walk through, a place of deep and abiding pease of mind, body and spirit. It is with great gratitude, I share the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose offerings from the 17th Century continue to flourish and opened me to the reconnection beyond time and space within the work of A Course in Miracles. The ways isare always made by following the path, sometimes through the unremembered gate into the garden. It is in the pages of Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom a bridge was built and a reminder, once again, 'we arrive, where we start.' Enjoy the final words of Little Gidding by TS Eliot as he weaves a work of art including wisdom from Julian of Norwich, Revalations of Love, spearing Anglo-Catholicism deep in the heart with his musings of mystical, philosophical and poetic works from the worlds religions including the Bhagavad-Gita and St. John of the Cross

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always-- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. -- T.S. Eliot

My writing about the divine love and wisdom of the garden manifested a beloved relationship with a local community garden ~ At The BirdHouse and together we have many beautiful memories, singing, dancing, moving, mulching, sharing wisdom, activating biophilia in ceremony, with sacred land acknowledgement and in forgiveness for all we have forgotten, all we've done in our ignorance and all the ways we've grown. The work of the heart is pure, the desire to manifest beauty is real, the care of each other and our land and all living things brings us to the center of the wholeness pattern. Whatever it is you are dreaming into existence, that is unfolding from the wishes of your heart, may a great light of possbility activate every seed lovingly planted and may grace follow every action you take from now, now. now. onward. May you feel the nourishmeant and divine love and wisdom of the garden, now, now, now.

There is a garden growing and flourishing brilliantly within the ground of your being utilizing divine intelligence symbiotically blossoming in service to the highest expression of who you are. This garden is nourished by Love. -- Mels Love Land

A quick look into the tending of our land with the powerful team At The BirdHouse:

Mels Love Land is an original Docu-Series that asks the question WHAT IF All Our Thoughts Were Loving? it is based on a book of the same title. Mel listens to a still small voice to go to the Love Land Public Library in Love Land, Colorado and bares witness to a universe of love in all its forms, offering its wisdom as advocacy to light up our collective heart. This bridge building work tells the true story of what happened when writer Melanie Lutz set out to love everyone and shares the stories captured and curated to heal our worlds.

We hope you experience more love, more joy and all the ways we are interconnected in the space of the heart.

Info:

Contact: MEL Love@MelsLoveLand.com