Room to Grow

Just recently, I found a blooming, yellow rose bush in my back yard. I happened to spy it out my small bathroom window. Busily brushing my teeth and getting ready for another work day, I peeked out the window and there it was: a secretive little bloomer almost completely choked out by some local weed-like bush. Without even thinking about it, I paused my tooth-brushing and let out a “ooooh” – the same sound a person utters when they see a newborn baby, or a clutch of freshly hatched chicks.

There’s something about yellow roses that make me nostalgic. They remind me of summer, they remind me of my mom’s garden back home, and the especially remind me of old homesteads. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever really seen an old homestead with blooming yellow roses, but, when I imagine a broken-down house from a hundred years ago, there’s always those buttery yellow roses in my mind too.

Anyway, back to the discovery in my yard.

It’s funny how once you find something that you never knew existed, you instantly become protective of it. Like a kid that finds a rusty old truck in the public sand box: discovered, immediately claimed as “mine” and then loved the whole ride home and, if really prized, slept with (filling the sheets with sand and bits of crumbling, rusty truck). So started my love for these roses: I found them, claimed them as my own (they ARE on my property after all) and, since I couldn’t drag it inside and sleep with it like the kid and his treasure, I went outside to hack that horrid weedy bush that had been trying to choke out my prized new bright buds.

Only when I had started hacking did I discover that the rose bush I had deemed ‘small’ actually filled more than three times what I thought did. The only reason why I hadn’t seen it before was because that flowering bush had intricately intertwined with the ever bothersome, most likely invasive, leafy monstrosity right next to it. Each thorny rose branch hugged the woody arms of the other plant, increasingly growing even more intimate with something that would inevitably choke the very life out of it- robbed of sunshine, nutrients, and with a lack of ‘room to grow’ my newly discovered prize had a slim chance of ever flourishing, or even surviving for that matter.

My dull clippers continued to pluck thick branches of the unidentified neighboring bush and, stem by stem, my happy rose revealed itself: a smattering of yellow buds that, for weeks now, craved sunshine and freedom. Little did I realize that with the necessary clipping of the enemy plant there came a lesson too. The more I trimmed their supportive stalk away and let the roses stand on their own, the more the roses sagged because its anemic little branches struggled to support the weight of heavy blossoms.

And so, my mind continued to draw small little connections with the rose’s scenario and my own life, the life of countless other people I know, and the hundreds, thousands, I dare say MILLIONS of others who- for one reason or another, grow in darkness, clinging to situations, people, jobs, habits that aren’t healthy for us- that choke joy and life out of us, but we’re too afraid to let go and stand on our own. We often hang on, growing intimately closer to the very source of our dysfunction, our discontent, and whatever else it is that hinders the development of who we are into who we were made to be.