Blossom This Way

​"Blossom This Way" - mixed media on paper, 14" x 10".  Available here and at Artfinder.

Our evening walk takes us by a rambunctious Great Dane behind a chain link fence.  His humans gave him astroturf to keep the area from being muddy...it is almost comically green; the Dane equally comical as he pounces on giant balls strewn throughout the yard.  But it is the fence that grabbed my attention this week.

Within the fence are imbedded the woody parts of trees and shrubs, the remainder of plants long gone.  These gnarled wood chunks are literally grown around the metal and have become a part of the fence.  Not an ideal  way to grow, but something did grow so strong near that fence that its parts cannot be removed.

The conditions we are planted in as humans are also not always ideal.  There are obstacles and impediments to our ability to become the greatest human we could possibly be.  I know you've experienced them. I have, too.

Those bits of tree and shrub in the fence remind me of how tenacious life can be - flexing and bending against obstacles in order to continue growing, even if that growth is awkward or inelegant.  Even if that obstacle must be incorporated into the very fiber of its own existence.  Hmmmm.

I've thought a lot about this lately.  Many of my mental musings and feelings are also inelegant - railing against the unfairness of life and the sheer magnitude of the obstacles.  But that fence is teaching me something.  My job isn't to wait for the perfect circumstances to grow and stretch and blossom.  It is to blossom this way, right here, in the midst of the chain link fence.  Firmly rooted, we can blossom wherever we are.