Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The Little Flower That Grew Into a Garden

“Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfillment.” ~ Robert Collier


A couple of years ago, I visited a friend whose thumb is a lot greener than my own. Her yard was amazing, front and back – from herbs to giant sunflowers, gardenias, roses, and even succulent vegetables, her home was surrounded by an explosion of different colors, and was easily distinguished from the much more subdued neighboring houses.

One day, I asked her about one particular pink flower growing on one side of her house, and she told me it was Evening Primrose. When she explained how resilient this plant was, and how easily it spread, my interest was piqued. She offered to give me a few flowers to plant in my own garden, which I put in the ground the moment I got home. It wasn’t but a few days later that my Evening Primrose appeared dead.

Last summer, when I went to prepare the flower beds for planting, I noticed a few plants that I thought were weeds. I pulled them, but I think I missed a few. This spring, I went outside one morning, and saw there were hundreds of the same plants, but this time they weren’t little any more. They had grown to about a foot and a half in height and were full of tight blossoms. A few days ago, I had the surprise of my life. A few of the blossoms had opened overnight, and they were the same flowers I had seen at my friend’s house!

When I went back out this morning, I couldn’t believe my eyes – the hot temperatures of the past few days, coupled with a rich moisture in the air, had worked the rest of the magic, and my house suddenly looked like a cottage in a Thomas Kincaid painting -- a cloud of pink flowers swallowed the tiny pathway from the driveway to the porch entrance, barely leaving a foot-wide of concrete to walk on. It was breathtaking…three little flowers had created a slice of Paradise!

All this time, I thought the flowers were dead; never once did it occur to me that they were working overtime underground to give me the yard I had always wanted. And yet they were; unbeknownst to me, tucked into a soft blanket of soil, the seeds had continued growing, spreading and exponentially multiplying.

And so can be with life – not all we plant sprouts immediately; all good things take time to manifest, but once the wheel is set in motion with intention, changes take place though we might not readily notice them on the surface. While we think everything is blocked and dormant, there is instead a tremendous amount of work taking place that we cannot see.

Life works on its own time schedule, unscathed by our complaints and wants, but once it finally decides to make its entrance it might be a manifestation we won’t soon forget.


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