Once upon a time there was a little girl 👧🏻 who loved flowers 🌷 She loved them so much that she wouldn’t pick them. Instead, she’d talk to them and tell them how beautiful they were and how they made the world a better place 💕
When this little girl grew up a bit, she moved to a magical place far, far away 🌏 called The Land of Sri Badrika Ashram. She still loved her mummy and daddy 👫🏻💕 very much but they were happy for her to have even more love in her life 💝 and so she went to The Land of Sri Badrika Ashram to live with her new mummy and daddy, and they were called Sri 👸🏻💖 and Hari 🤴🏻💞 (We’ll call them Mummy and Daddy in this story).
This little girl loved to be in Mummy and Daddy’s home in the mountains 🏞️ She loved their Creation Garden best of all. She would watch the butterflies 🦋 and feel like she was dancing with them 💃🏻 She would breathe in the clear blue skies and feel like a bird 🕊️ She loved how the colour of the river changed as it bubbled over the rocks 🌊 and sparkled in the sunshine 🌝
Sometimes, the little girl would sing for Mummy and Daddy 👧🏻🎵 And sometimes, she was so happy when she sang that she cried 😭💓 It made Mummy and Daddy so happy that they cried with her and hugged her tightly 👨👩👧💖
Mummy and Daddy gave the little girl a lovely little cottage on the hillside 🏡 And because they knew how much she loved their Creation Garden 🌺🌿 they gave her a balcony so that she could look out at it all day long.
Because the little girl was a bit grown up now, she had learned about something called The Amazing Amazon Tree 🌴 She could ask The Amazing Amazon Tree for almost anything and it would appear at her little cottage door, like magic! 📦 🌟
The little girl wished that her balcony looked just like a piece of Mummy and Daddy’s Creation Garden, but she didn’t want to plant real flowers in case she couldn’t take good care of them. She would feel sad if the flowers died 😥💔
The little girl asked The Amazing Amazon Tree for a grass-like carpet to sit on and some brightly coloured flower pots. They appeared in an instant and made the balcony look very cheerful 😊 The little girl was very happy, so next she asked The Amazing Amazon Tree for some silken flowers made of pretty coloured fabric to fill the pots with 🌺💐🌷
But, something had happened to The Amazing Amazon Tree 🌴 😲 Each time the tree showed the little girl the flowers it could get, the little girl saw that they were very small and sad looking 😔 They were made of plastic and didn’t look much like Mummy and Daddy’s flowers in their Creation Garden. Perhaps The Amazing Amazon Tree was very tired now 😴 and getting ready for the winter hibernation 🌨️❄️ As it had come all the way from the Amazon Jungle 🌴🌞 where it was always very warm, the Amazing Amazon Tree didn’t like the winter very much.
The little girl was sad for a moment as she remembered her old friend, The Ikea Fairy 🧚♂️ in the Unicorn Kingdom 🦄 🌍 where she had come from. When she had lived there, in the U.K., she had filled her home with lots of the prettiest, fabric flowers 💐 from The Ikea Fairy 🧚♂️ But now, she was far, far away and The Ikea Fairy couldn’t hear her 🙁
The little girl decided that it didn’t matter, she would accept whatever she got from The Amazing Amazon Tree and did her best to make her balcony look as pretty as possible 😊
A few weeks passed by. Then, one day, the day after Mummy and Daddy’s birthday 🎂 when all the guests had gone home after the party 🎉 the little girl was cleaning Mummy and Daddy’s favourite room in the land. It was called The Grand Temple Room 💖🏯💖 She looked to one side and saw the silhouettes of two plants 🌿🌱 in pots by a window. Oh, how lovely! she thought to herself. One of the guests must have brought them as a birthday present for Mummy and Daddy 🎁 I’d better give them to the gardener so that he can find the perfect place to plant them outside 🌞🌿🌱
As it was a little dark in The Grand Temple Room, the little girl opened the curtains and got a better look at the plants. To her amazement they weren’t just plants at all! One was a cutting of a beautiful, pink rose bush 🌷 and the other was a burst of colour of different types of flowers and leaves 💐 So many different colours: blue, red, pink, yellow, orange, green, purple. All the colours of the rainbow and more! 🌈 😁
The little girl took an even closer look at the flowers now and was doubly amazed to find that they weren’t even real flowers at all! The soft petals and leaves were made of a wonderful, silken fabric, yet the roses looked so real they could easily have been mistaken for those in Mummy and Daddy’s Creation Garden 🌺🌻🌹💐😁😍
What a strange birthday gift for Mummy and Daddy, the little girl thought. Guests came to see Mummy and Daddy all the time and they would sometimes bring flowers, but they were always real flowers. Nobody had ever brought fabric flowers for Mummy and Daddy, and especially not ones that came in flower pots. It was a very strange gift indeed!
Mr. Happy Monk 😁🧘🏻♂️was in charge of The Grand Temple Room, so the little girl thought it best to ask him what to do with the flowers and skipped off to find him🚶🏻♀️
It was Mr. Happy Monk’s play time and he was enjoying a game of Ludo out on the grass verge. “Do you want them?” 😁💁🏻♂️ he said when the little girl asked him about the flowers.
“Well, I’m making a little garden of fabric flowers in my balcony,” the little girl said, somewhat surprised.
“Very well, very well, they’ll do nicely then,” Mr. Happy Monk said.
“Oh, thank you, Mummy and Daddy! 🙆🏻♀️ 😍 Thank you, Mr. Happy Monk!” the little girl squealed. She always thanked Mummy and Daddy for everything, even if she couldn’t see them 🙇🏻♀️🙏🏻
The little girl was over the moon now. She gave Mr. Happy Monk a little curtsey and hopped, skipped and jumped 🤸🏻♀️ all the way back to The Grand Temple Room 💖🏯💖 with a big smile on her face 😁
Very carefully, picking up both flower pots, she brought them back to her cottage 🏡 and placed them on her balcony. She put one next to her reading chair and one next to her cute, goofy garden gnome 🧙🏻♂️ holding a sign that read ‘Welcome’. The new flowers looked very happy indeed.
The sun was shining brightly 🌞 and the little girl’s balcony was now alive with colour and fabric flowers in full bloom 💐🌷🌺🌻 She looked around feeling very thankful — her garden was complete 🧘🏻♂️😊
She thanked Mummy and Daddy over and over again for making her little balcony garden so beautiful 🙆🏻♀️🥰🙇🏻♀️ She knew how difficult it was to find flowers like this in this land, and she wondered where they could possibly have come from.
Looking at the new flowers once more before heading indoors, the little girl saw that there was something sticking out from behind one of the pink roses 🌷 It didn’t look like a flower or a leaf. It was a different colour, almost white.
The little girl gently lifted a rose petal to get a closer look. She saw that it was just a tiny piece of paper. She tried to pick the paper out from among the leaves but she couldn’t. The paper was stuck. It was tied to one of the rose stems by a bit of string. “Oh, silly me!” she said to herself. “It’s a tag.”
The little girl turned the little tag over and it opened up just like a teeny-tiny birthday card. The tag had some writing inside it, some small lettering and some big. There was one big word in particular, in big black letters, right in the middle of the tag. The little girl read the word and could not believe her eyes. Could this be true! The word in the middle of the tag read… ‘Ikea’ 😲⁉️
The End
… Well, almost The End
You see, if the story had ended here, it would have been magical enough, but when Mummy and Daddy 👩❤️👨 are around, they do everything to make the little girl happy. And, a story without some adversity isn’t a good story at all.
Some months passed, and all was well, until one day, a pair of giant ravens 🦅🦅 black as the night, made their home in one of the balconies next to the little girl’s cottage.
The ravens were very naughty and they would come to the little girl’s balcony every day and pick at all her flowers 🥀 They would make a lot of noise and create a big mess too.
The little girl talked to the ravens from her heart. She politely asked them to find another home in Mummy and Daddy’s Creation Garden which would be far more suitable for them 🙏🏻
Eventually the ravens moved away but not before destroying the little girl’s garden 🥀🥺 The flower pots on the balcony railing were now empty. The little plastic flowers were all torn to shreds and her bunch of bright yellow tulips had disappeared completely. The yellow tulips were her favourite flowers from The Amazing Amazon Tree 🌴 and she had been a bit sad when The Amazing Amazon Tree said it couldn’t get them for her again 😞
(Incidentally, some weeks later, she found her yellow tulips in the den of the apothecary of the land 🏥 The little girl was feeling poorly in her tummy one day 🤢 and had gone to see the apothecary 👩🏻⚕️ for a potion to make her tummy feel better. When she arrived, she was amazed to see some yellow fabric tulips on the apothecary’s potion table. The apothecary told the little girl that a woman from a neighbouring land had found them on her morning walk and had washed them off and brought them to her as a gift to brighten up her den 💫 The little girl told the apothecary about the naughty ravens. The kind apothecary gave a hearty laugh 👩🏻⚕️😄 at the story and gladly returned the yellow tulips to the little girl. That made her very happy and her tummy got better too 😊)
The little girl knew that Mummy and Daddy were watching over her, for, on her balcony, the flowers from The Ikea Fairy of this land were still there! 🙆🏻♀️💃🏻The naughty ravens didn’t even touch them! They were completely intact and looking as bright and beautiful as ever! 😁😁😁
Every day the little girl steps outside onto her balcony and looks at the sky and the hills and the river 🏞️ and at her Ikea Fairy flowers 💐 🌸🌷 and she knows the magic will never end 💫🌟
She knows that everything around her is magic 🌟 Her life is magical 💫 The far, far away Land of Sri Badrika Ashram is magical 💖 She is loved and protected 💕And, it’s all because of Mummy 👸🏻 and Daddy🤴🏻 Because they are the most magical! All the magic comes from them 🌟💖💕💫🌟 Their magic is never ending.
The End
Really, The End.
I’ve written this story for two reasons: One, to share Sri Hari’s Kindness and Leela with you, and two, because I would love to know who the medium of so much joy was. To date I have no idea who brought these flowers!
I am gobsmacked and in awe of Bhagwan that I live in the middle of the Himalayas and I had a passing thought about something as specific as Ikea flowers and Bhagwan made it happen! Just like that! I didn’t even know there was an Ikea store in India. There definitely isn’t one anywhere around here. Whomever brought them, travelled a great distance with them and they couldn’t have put them in a suitcase, the flowers would have gotten crumpled. They were brought here with great care and love.
If you or someone you know brought them to the ashram for Swami ji’s birthday in November (I think it was two years ago. I can’t remember which year it was exactly), please do let me know in the comments below. I’d love to thank you and finally solve this mystery! 🙂
Mr. Gnome looking after the Pink Roses. (They’re a little faded from the sun now, but still beautiful!)
The colourful flowers from The Ikea Fairy of this land 🙂
The apothecary, Dr. Geeta ji (2nd from the left) and Mr. Happy Monk, Raghu Swami ji (centre) when he’s not taking care of Mummy and Daddy or playing Ludo.
Although He’s been moved now, this was Little Swami ji’s place in my garden.
(Originally published on os.me on December 2, 2020)