I learned this in the garden today...it is the thorns...

I am blessed with beautiful roses blooming in my garden, and the high point of the day is going out to pick them. They are different, some bushes producing beautiful peach-colored blooms, some in shades of pink…beautiful, fragrant ivory-colored roses, yellows and reds.

I bring whatever is blooming on a given day … they are giving me their best. I bring them into my kitchen and trim them, cut the extra leaves off, I ready them to go into a vase together, to brighten the entryway, or the kitchen table, or my desk…

But they all, despite their beauty…they have thorns. They have sharp spears that jab at one another, and at me. When I try to bring them together, to see them sharing their individual beauty together, their sweet fragrances blending, if I am not careful —the thorns tangle, and stop the stems from fitting together. I have to gently nudge, re-align, adjust… take them out and re-arrange them, so that the thorns don’t interfere with the coming together of their beauty.

They are just like us, right now, in this world. We all have thorns…disagreements, insult-hurlings, political rants, shouts, condemnations, resentments, angers. We all have thorns. And the thorns keep us from coming together.

If the roses could not be gently arranged, thorns avoided, carefully brought together in the vase filled with water that the blooms need to survive - they would all wilt, and wither on the kitchen counter. They can’t do anything about their thorns. They’re stuck with them.

WE can do something about ours. But if we don’t deal with our own thorns… if we can’t arrange ourselves to come together, LIVES will be lost, LIVELIHOODS will be lost. We will not get through this unpredictable, threatening time alive, together …, unless we can get rid of the thorns covering our psyches, our egos, our souls….thorns that pierce others in our community, that anger and threaten.

We have to preserve the beauty, the lives, the good we can share in the world, and we can do this. It’s time.