If a flower could do it...

These pictures were taken at sunset at Treasure Beach a week ago, where we went for our first retreat. Breathtakingly beautiful. In the first, the water reflected the red sky. In the second, the world took on a golden hue, healing and peaceful.



I am trying to start a garden. It has been a feeble attempt because I think I may have the opposite of a green thumb, but I am just hoping a green thumb can be acquired and it is not something you have to be born with.

So my garden. It is built into this ledge in front of my house, being held up by a rock wall. I have already planted sorrel (a flower to make my favorite juice), tomato and Irish potato. Next is cucumber and pineapple. Now, although I have initiated this project, I am not the brains behind the operation. Frank, a man who has worked here for about forty years, has been helping me acquire the seeds and proper planting technique. He basically prepares the land, digs the hole, and I drop the seeds in, one by one, until he says “alright, alright”. It could be at times pretty comical, because I tend to make mistakes often and he just takes it from me and does it instead.

So I guess what the first line of this entry should have been was: I am helping to start a garden by incorrectly placing seeds in holes. Haha

I tend to check on the saplings every morning before I leave for work. It is exciting to see the tiny stems break though the man made hole and then sprout tiny leaves that will soon turn into flowers that I will (hopefully) one day be able to pick and make juice out of. This morning, when I walked out, the sun shone on the little guys as it seemed they were stretching to take in all they could.

But what grabbed my attention was not that a new sapling had broken through. Instead, I saw that a huge flower had emerged from a vine that was growing out of the side of the rock bed. Giant and pink, and growing essentially out of rock, the last place I would imagine a flower to emerge. Here I am, nurturing the saplings of the Sorrel flower, hoping that just one will grow with enough love and care (aka water and sunlight), and out of rock came this beautiful entity, made by God just to brighten someone day, despite all that was betting against it.

So it got me thinking about purpose. Purpose of flowers, purpose of sunshine, purpose of lightening bugs, purpose of people. Purpose is a loaded word, huh? Purpose is even a scary word, because it demands you to dig deep into yourself, a place that can be intimidating, unknown, and even tumultuous. I mean, I wonder what the purpose of that flower is. That single flower that has emerged from rock, that will not turn into fruit for us to eat. I guess scientifically thinking, flowers produce pollen…blah blah blah. This is true.

But what about its beauty?

What about its wonder?

What about the smile it put on my face?

We too, have purpose. We too, come from tough, tough places where it is easy to doubt that anything beautiful can come from it, like a rock wall. But it happens. Beautiful people emerge from hard places all the time. And it is those beautiful people that bring a single, solitary smile to a persons face. To show that it can be done.

It can be done.

And lets be serious, smiles are contagious, right?

I see it here a lot, in children who have nothing positive to go home to, in parents who have been overcome with sickness and poverty, or in teachers who have drowned in being overworked, underpaid and discouraged.

Or even in you and me who have our own struggles we deal with every day. We all struggling. But there is still beauty present in humanity. Despite all the hurt, pain, ugliness, destruction, and rockiness, there is still that lone flower that shines as bright as day to help bring out the beauty in the surrounding flowers, the surrounding people.

So if a flower can do it, so can we. Bloom from that rocky place where nobody thought you could! Or help someone see they can too. Because we each can, and I think that if each of us even does just one thing for someone else, together we can make the world a better place, or at least a better the world for that single person, and in the long run, what really changes the world? Each individual, of course.