Episode 39 - "A Gift in the Thorns"

Sometimes the very thing we try to clear away is the thing that was meant to nourish us.

In this episode, “The Gift in the Thorns,” I share a simple, yet powerful moment; what we once saw as a nuisance, revealed itself as a blessing.

Guided by:

Ancestors & Spirit Guides

The energy of Birch - new beginnings, change, grace, and protection.

This episode invites you to reflect:

What have you been resisting?

What have you labeled as “in the way”?

What might be growing there that you haven’t yet seen?

Sometimes the thorns aren’t blocking the gift; they’re protecting it.

As always, if you feel drawn to, you may donate to me via Venmo:

@John-Ginn-8

Please email stories, questions, etc. to lessonswithwesley@gmail.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Lessons with Wesley. If this found you, it was meant to. Take a moment to pause, reflect, and breathe. You're entering a sacred space of tarot, of oracle, meditations, oum, and soul-centered wisdom. There are no coincidences here, only invitations. Lessons with Wesley.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

This weekend, something we used to complain about fed us. The thorns, what we resist, avoid, or label as a nuisance, the dewberries, hidden nourishment, memory, unexpected joy. And the truth beneath it all. Sometimes we don't recognize what's good for us because of how it first appears. Welcome everyone to Lessons with Wesley. This is episode 39, The Gift in the Thorns. Well, I hope y'all are I hope y'all had a great week last week. I hope y'all have if y'all are listening to this on Monday morning. I hope y'all have a fantastic Monday morning. And have a great week. Y'all, we got four. Count them. One, two, three, a thorough. Four weeks of school left. Oh my gosh. I am. If y'all teachers out there, you know how I feel. You know we are so dang excited. These four weeks, they are not gonna be the longest four weeks. They better not be. Oh my gosh. No, yes. Love, love, love my job, love my career, love teaching. Woohoo! Oh, you get paid for the summer. No. That's money I've already earned. They hold it out of my paycheck. This is not a summer break. This is called uh rehabilitation. That's what this is. So I am definitely looking forward to the summer. Good grief, y'all. This this these next four weeks are going to be a whirlwind between packing and moving and wrapping up school and moving stuff out of my classroom. I've been at this school for like 12 13 years, something like that. Oh my goodness. But anyway, it's gonna be good, it's gonna be great. Okay, so uh first off, I want to just give shout-outs. Y'all, the second country, the biggest downloads besides the US is Vietnam. So I am so thankful for the listeners in Vietnam. I would also love to hear from some of you if you would um send an email to lessonswithwesley at gmail.com. That would be fantastic. The link is right there on the uh whatever platform you're listening uh to the podcast. And I wanted to um thank you so much, Lady Whiskey, for the five-star reviews. She said, mercy, excellent, each serious participant will receive blessings, period. Keep this up, Wesley. The spring cleaning episode. Always appreciate the inspiration and you are inspiring. And the I think this was the previous one, Quiet Offering. Uh, she said it's calming and thought-provoking, much needed and gratefully received. Well, thank you so much, a lady of whiskey. Okay, so let's get into it. So this is episode 39, A Gift in the Thorns. So yesterday, Nathan and I were outside our house, and those of you that know us, we have a side lot that we call the sanctuary. Well, since we're moving, yes, we've been kind of cleaning and straightening, but I never weedy the sanctuary, I always weed eat it down. Uh we always follow the love your yard whenever Valentine's Day falls, that's the weekend you cut everything back. And that's what we've always followed. But since we're moving, I said, heck, I am not about to cut all that down. And we always fuss about these briars, these thorns and vines that always grow up everywhere. And so we always get aggravated those and put on our water boots and gloves and pull those suckers up, and that's what you have to do. You have to keep them under control, otherwise they're gonna grow up and choke everything. But there are a couple of different vines out there. Um but like I said, this time we didn't, or I didn't cut them down because I said, I'm not fooling with it. We are moving, and and also I wanted to see what I wanted to see Mother Nature take care of herself. Now I kept the pathways weed-eated and mowed, but all the other stuff, all the cattails, all the um like the faux sugarcane plants, I just let all that just fall on its own. And y'all guess what? Those vines that we have always complained about and pulled up and weed-eated, those were dewberries. And Nathan picked some of those and said, Look, John, I got a handful of dewberries, and so we ate them. And and that's where this, and I said, uh, because I've been thinking that day earlier that morning, okay, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And I was looking up and I went to the internet, I went to Chat GPT, I said, Are there any like astronomical signs? I mean, it can have a few things, but it just wasn't sitting with me. I'm like, no, that's not what I want to talk about. And then I was just thinking, well, I'll just do, you know, I'll just do a ask the listeners to set their intention and how does this card pool and OM stick pool tie tie into it? But when he did that and came up, I was like, there's my episode. Out of all those things we've been complaining about, and you know, just tearing not letting grow fed us and brought back memories because good grief, I used to grow up out in Kokomo, Mississippi, and I used to go to the pond as a kid, junior high and high school, and go fishing, and I would just pick those all the time, and that was just something I did, and that alone just made me feel great inside and brought back tons of wonderful memories. So but anyway, so that is how this episode came about of how this is you know, something we found a nuisance. Once you leave it alone, you realize, nope, I'm actually trying to give you a gift. So, but anyway, so I'm gonna get into the card pool and the om stick pool. So let's get ready. Alright, y'all. So wherever you are, if you're able to, just take a few breaths. You know what I usually say breathe in through your nose, hold it for four, breathe in for four, hold for four, blow it out for six, do it again, blow it out for like six, eight seconds, and I always like to do it a little bit longer every time. So I'll do one with you. Okay, so for the card pool, since it was Mother Earth, nature, and just childhood memories and vines and thorns, I said I'm going with the my Native American deck, the wisdom of the elders. So this one's by Sean Leonard and Tracy Metallic and Erin Googu. They did the artwork. So this was number nine ancestors, spirit guides. Um, I won't read all of it, but it uh talks about rather than feeling separate from our ancestors and spirit guides, it's important to realize that we do have a deep bond with them. They're always trying to assist us and they're watching over us. And it really speaks of um trusting our ancestors, trusting that yes, we are heard. And I like this part, and I feel it ties in. It talks about being patient. Be patient with ourselves. We need to be patient, and we also need to be very mindful of how harsh, like those thorns, how harsh we speak to ourselves. And you think about it, the way the negative things we say to ourselves, oh my god, I'm so ugly, I'm so fat, I can't do this, oh I suck. That's painful. So we need to be patient with ourselves. And if Nathan and I have been patient with those thorns out in the sanctuary, you know, if we had been, if we had known what they were, not been so harsh. Good lord, we've been at this place for six and a half years. We could have had wonderful berries to be eating on throughout the spring, and I I guarantee ya, my sweet love would have made a dewberry pie, because that boy takes my grandmother's huckaberry blueberry pie, huckleberry pie recipe, and he makes his own crust. We would have had us a pie out of that. We still might before we leave. So if we had been patient, we would have known that. So that's just how I feel, how that might have tied in. If you know, things might be hard, things might be difficult, and we ask for guidance, and we don't get it right away, and we reach out and grab it, and but that's when we just you can't reach out and grab those thorns and squeeze because it's gonna hurt. But if you're patient, you can tenderly see the gift that's waiting on the other side. And the Olimstick, Olim Stick was birch, and y'all, birch, uh birch stands for purification, it talks about change and new beginnings, and I love this part protection and grace. And if that doesn't tie in perfectly to those thorns and the dewberries that were growing, I mean thorns for protection. If Nathan and I had had the grace, and we would have had this wonderful gift, you know, those dewberries are protected by those thorns. So it would have provided some nourishment for us, but nope, we were just cutting it all down. So, y'all, the card says, We're heard, we are guided, and sometimes guidance, you know, it doesn't arrive as this this audible voice or this huge boom drop in your face. It's an experience. So sometimes in life, you know, we want to rush things, especially today. You want to press the button, the internet's not going fast, we get frustrated. We gotta be patient, we gotta show love and mercy to the things that we don't understand. And the ancestors, they're telling us that. Be patient, they're gonna show us. Y'all hear my sweet little thieve, a fiorello. Sweet boy. So it might be something simple, something earthy, something real. If we had been patient, you know, we would have had that nourishment all along. And like I said, the birch, the OM stick stands for change, grace, new beginnings. And um, and birch. I didn't know this. Uh I looked it up, and uh, it's the first tree of the Celtic year, and it represents a fresh start. Not from nothing though. I mean, Nathan, I, yeah, we're getting us a fresh start. Good grief. End of this four weeks, boom. Fresh start. We gotta have grace. We gotta have grace. And I'm going through my family. We're um, it's not coming up yet. This will be an episode. I don't this episode might be coming up sooner than I want, maybe in May or June, but we're going through something with my aunt. Speaking of growing out in Kokomo, growing up in Kokomo and having such wonderful memories of being living out there. My aunt, she pretty soon is gonna have to go through a a time, a change in her life. And luckily with her Alzheimer's, uh, it's just it's time to go into an assisted living, an Alzheimer's clinic, but luckily it's gonna be in the new place where Nathan and I are going to be living, and my brothers are right there. So that's just that's just wonderful. That yes, she's so like her I mean she worked all her life and she saved up all this money, and then all that money has gone, which is great, gone towards 24-7 care, which I hate because of T1 dia she's a T1 diabetic and and then dementia and Alzheimer's, but why am I bringing that up? Because I'm being positive. I'm trying to think that this horrible, hurtful vine, this thorn that you want to grab and get rid of and burn up. I'm hoping that it is gonna be this wonderful, beautiful gift for for my wonderful aunt that I love more than anything. Oh my goodness, I love that lady so much. I love you, Nathan, more than anything. But I'm just saying that hopefully this will be a wonderful, surprising gift if we just had the grace and the patience to go through this process and the pain of pulling her out of her place that she's been for 46 years, and it's just oh. But anyway, can't see what the cards show me and the OM stick shows when that episode comes up. But my point is, I'm gonna try to have grace with this moment going through the process and the pain and the hurt of the thorns, and hopefully there will be this beautiful gift, and we're gonna be right there with her, so but anyway. We gotta have grace with the timing in ourselves. So clearly, the thorns, they were never the problem, folks. The perception was. The perception, if we had just looked at it from a different angle, and guess what? Go even deeper, the thorns, they weren't the problem, they were the protection, they're blocking the gift, they were guarding it. So, how many things in our lives have we tried to clear away? How many things have we not realized were actually the gift? We gotta be patient with what we don't understand. Show grace to what frustrates us. And it's that it ties back into that quiet moment, that instinct, trusting in ourselves. You gotta trust in yourself. Things might not see what seem like what they are at first. See, y'all, before you clear it away, before you cut it down, you gotta be patient. Show love. What's growing here that I haven't seen? And I'm talking to myself here too. With these next four weeks, these problems that we see might pop up if we're just patient. It might actually be this wonderful gift, this wonderful fruit that's actually gonna provide nourishment in the long run. Alright, folks. Love ya. If you've gotten something out of this episode, just like, subscribe, not subscribe, just like, copy that link, share it with your family. All you do is press that hot dog, those three dots. Just click share link, text it to your family, text it to your friends. Just give it a five-star rating if you want. Just review, email, lessons with Wesley at gmail.com. Alright, folks. You got thorns in your life, you might need to leave them a little bit. There might be this change coming. Out of this pain might come this wonderful nourishment. And until I see you speak with you next time, I'm just gonna let this song that Nathan and I one this is one of the songs. Ooh, I can't wait for the next song. My wonderful new toy came in. It's a tongue drum, like a steel drum, tongue drum. I can't wait to play it for you. But I'm just gonna let this play out. Y'all have a wonderful day, have a wonderful week, and remember show love, show kindness, and not just show patience with others, but you gotta be patient with yourself. Ga bless you.