On a morning last week I was sitting at the kitchen table pruning the mini-roses I have in pots on my window sill in the hopes I can plant them outside come the spring, and I got to ruminating on how awesome roses are as a symbol. Now most people like to point to the fact that roses are beautiful and smell good but they have thorns and the thorns stick in your skin real well and all that jazz. Sure, fine, great metaphor fodder.
But you know what’s really impressive about roses? The thing that really makes roses one of the biggest bad asses in the flower world? Their resiliency. Seriously, have you ever tried to kill a rose bush? On purpose, I mean? Its tough. And why is it tough? Because the root system is so resilient the darn things can regenerate from just about any damage so long as the root system remains intact. Cut those pretty, smell-good bastards back to nothing but a few pathetic looking stumps sticking up out of the ground reaching toward the sky like the victims of a serial flower murderer, and what do they do? They turn around the next growing season and come back like gang busters, growing bigger, stronger and healthier than every before.
Impressive, sure, but you know what’s even cooler? Roses aren’t just capable of these amazing feats of regeneration. Regenerating is a necessity of their life cycle. They’re basically The Doctor of plants in that regard. Pruning is a necessity for the rose bush not just for cosmetic reasons but because if the rose isn’t pruned it will become a danger to itself. As vines and buds die, slowly the foliage begins to become entangled, inexorably weaving the plant into a self-destructing mess, and eventually the plant chokes itself and dies. In order to survive the rose bush has to have its dead and dying parts cut back and cast away. Sometimes even parts of it that are still healthy, because by cutting it back you promote the new growth it needs to become stronger.
Yet how many of us don’t want to cut away at our beautiful rose bushes and so allow them to die for our good intentions?
Be a rose bush, my friends, but don’t rely on others to prune you. Learn the art of pruning yourself, and you will grow stronger and healthier than ever.
Or don’t, I’m not your boss. There are plenty of other plants out there you can be like that don’t require pruning if you want.
But, for the sake of having an eloquent message to wrap up with I’ll just say it. Be a rose bush.
This ramble has been brought to you by Aaron’s Random Thoughts LLC, a subsidiary of Aaron’s Brain Inc.
