LIstening to Roses

Now that my tendonitis is finally on the mend, I’ve found both my legs and my mind wandering on longer and longer walks.

My legs carry me around the lake, cool mist clinging to its surface as the sun starts its daily game of peek-a-boo over the hills and through the trees, my mind carrying me into deep thoughts and conversations about politics, religion, pollution, the food industry - anything, really, to help me make sense of the world.

Other times, these legs ramble up a (very steep) hill in the evening as the golden light filters through the trees, both things leaving me breathless, and in between swatting at the flies, my mind rambles from dream to dream - love, writing, home ownership, and on and on, like a bumblebee visiting each flower in a field.

When I’m indoors, on the other hand, I find myself thinking about the things I should be doing (like making a spreadsheet or prepping my lunch or removing the word “should” from my vocabulary). There is something about the natural world that connects our minds and hearts with the deeper things of God if we muster our bodies to venture outside and dive into its green, wild glory.

Mary Oliver gets it. If you’re not familiar, she’s a poet who drew most of the inspiration for her work from her wanderings in nature. There’s one poem in particular that I’ve been reading and re-reading for the last few weeks: “When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention.”

Sure, I don’t have roses to listen to, but I do have trees and wildflowers and rabbits and all manner of things, and as Oliver describes the roses as doing what they were created to do, joyfully, there’s a line that catches in my chest:

And [the roses] went on “Listen,

the heart-shackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, and

selfishness.”

What holds us back aren’t the truly painful and tragic things, oftentimes those actually propel us because they demand growth and change. The things that restrain us are the things of our own making - weariness, regret, and fear, or conversely, excessive pride and selfishness. We build shackles with our apathy, self-consciousness, or hubris, and there we sit, on the line between contentment and discontentment, tasting nothing of true pain or pleasure. Our egos like it that way because they know well the prison we build for ourselves, and there is a strange comfort that comes with that type of predictable nothingness.

I don’t want that life, do you?

Then come with me!

Let’s roam wild together through the woods. Let’s breathe with the trees and laugh with the flowers and hold each other steady when we stumble over branches. When we fall, let’s feel the pain, cry, and carry on again, knowing that joy is just around the next bend. No, not around the next bend. It’s within us, but sometimes we have to wander to find it again.