As anyone who gardens, as devotee or dabbler, knows, gardening is rewarding, but sometimes frustrating. You toil mightily to get things you want to grow to grow, and to keep things you don’t want to grow from growing.
You prepare a small plot; amend the soil; lovingly plant seeds, bulbs or fledgling plants; water properly; nourish regularly; even coax them along with a smile or song. Yet your plants may stubbornly refuse to flourish. As you bemoan the failure, you meander past an arid, rocky, unlit spot where one-foot weeds are in full glory. Somewhere, Mother Nature is chuckling.
Enjoy the Flowers; Learn from the Weeds
In life as in gardening, sometimes it is difficult to see the flowers for the weeds. At times, all of us feel beset by troubles and tragedies. We feel so overpowered by the weeds’ presence in our lives that we allow them to predominate, keeping us from celebrating the flowers.
I’m not a horticulturist, so I cannot turn your yard into a garden paradise. But as a fellow traveler in the garden of life, I have learned that if I look carefully, I can see past the weeds to the flowers; to the good things and great people that bring me joy.
Weeds teach us something valuable. We need to develop the inner strength to accept the bad with the good; the sad with the happy; to live in our life’s garden as fully and well as we can.
