Mary was an ardent gardener. She worked hard on her Saturdays to prune and trim and tidy and weed and rake and tie and pick. She meticulous watered her gardens every Wednesday between 7 and 9am and every Sunday between 4 and 7pm with a hose with a trigger nozzle so as not to waste any water and with a watering can for those hard-to-reach plants.
Her roses were her pride. She never tired of visitors praising her roses as they came to her door and would lavish them on friends, family, colleagues, visitors and strangers alike. But from time to time she did get irritated at the thorns. Despite her thick gardening gloves, she often pricked or scratched or scored herself when pruning or picking or planting or weeding.
“Why do roses have to have thorns?!” she asks.
But the thing is, in a world where we focus on beauty, we presume that roses grow thorns as a defence. We believe that beauty is fragile and needs to be protected. We take it as an analogy that that which is lovely must develop barriers and that care must be taken in handling that which we love for it might hurt us.
Why do we never consider that maybe it’s not roses that have thorns, but thorns that have roses. Maybe the thorns, isolated, unloved, alienated, conceived of a flower so beautiful that all who saw it loved it and were momentarily distracted from the thorny stems leading to the blooms.
But if that’s the case, I doubt the thorns mind our preoccupation with the flowers, although they may blush with shame when we curse their own intrusion on our awareness.
No comments:
Post a Comment