Roses, as all gardeners know, frequently fall stricken with blights, bugs, and fungi. We spend the winter hoping that our beautiful gems survive, patently remove dead wood and shape them into sculpture like perfection in spring, and then spend our summer waiting for aphids, or fungus. Of course roses offer us a quick, wonderful reward—our well tended bushes bloom pink, red or orange and climb over our roof-line.
Roses appear in nature, but they lack shape, variety of color or abundance. Wild roses offer us a once yearly glance at four or five red petals, so different from the abundance we see in a well tended garden. Centuries of human melding and molding turned the rose into something new, glorious and ours. Roses rarely rank high on the list of human achievements; instead, we mark cathedrals, vaccines, and bombs as mankind’s lasting tattoos upon the earth. Those creations, though bound by worldly physics and materials, reside outside of nature. In fact, they counter nature’s beauty with the beauty of man. Roses, however, stand as a pinnacle of achievement within nature. Man did not build this cathedral on cleared forest, rather meticulously crafted, and altered the genetics of a simple flower. The flowers are not completed; they are continuously changing with our ideas of beauty and our need for strength. We continue to alter their color, smell, and push them into growing in ever colder, dryer, or disease ridden environments. These roses, once purchased from the nursery, become the responsibility of the gardener who spends hours maintaining their beauty and making them stronger for the battles against disease and long winters that they fight.
We are much like roses because we are born with some inherent beauty that we craft into a more vibrant and various soul; however, we are the roses, the gardener, and the botanist. We take the potential beauty in our soul and slowly, over decades, create a unique and majestic person. Unlike roses who bloom only one color we are a garden; we build upon our past personalities and make something changeable and increasing in beauty. Importantly, we craft our own soul and should rarely, if ever, rely on the aide of others. We make ourselves beautiful.
Creating a beautiful soul takes work and dedication, but having a soul that blooms vibrant after suffering takes strength. A lovely rose that dies the first hard winter or at the first bug bite is useless. In the same way, our soul’s beauty must be backed with an internal strength. Only we can make the garden of our soul into something beautiful, but all that will go for naught if our beauty does not lie deep in the roots of our being so that we can always bloom majestic after winter. The easy beauty of a smile does not carry one through winters and blights unaided and the only aide we can expect is our own. So just as roses must be cared for in the summer if they are to bloom in spring,we must prepare our strength and raise our opinions of ourselves in times of joy; for, winter always comes followed by spring.
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