Rose flowers in December 2020 !

I arranged all the photographers of rose flowers I took in December 2020 from our garden and found distinct petal arrangement in each of them. A few were comparable and yet different. The arrangements of the petals looked orderly or pleomorphic. Each pattern is distinct to tha particular plant, as the earlier photos I have of the flowers from the same plant look similar with each blossom. 

The interesting metaphor of this is even more captivating. Anna and I have been planting  rose plants for the last two years in our garden, each representing one person that we want to remember gratefully for what that person meant to us during years of association with them. Most of them are alive and few have moved on to his or her eternal journey. 

Just as each flower is distinct in colour and petal arrangements, these friends too have been different and distinct in conduct, character and temperament. What a diversity of experiences, association with each person brought in to ur lives! The recollection of people represented in these rose flowers has been an overwhelming experience. Not that all experiences were pleasant or easy, but each person added a shade to our thinking and values. 

It is when we take time to recall and reflect on people in our lives, that we get a sense of how we journeyed through our formative experience in different stages in our lives, with each person bringing a distinct flavour to our lives. 

One of the persons represented in this flower collection celebrated his 92nd birthday last week. Our son and family who happened to meet him a week before his birthday told us that he was most gracious and conversational. They had heard from Anna and me many stories about this person and his family. It was their first meeting with them. They were able to feel the specialness of this couple, who live vibrantly and composed in their advancing years with an ever ready welcome for others in their lives. 

A garden is a gathering of plants and flowers of different species. Each has a place in the garden. There are weeds also in the garden. This to me is the reality of life. 

When the outgoing president of the USA has been most irresponsible in his behaviour in provoking his followers to be 'militant' even to invade the Capitol Hill or the the prime minister of India has been insensitive to the thousands of protesting farmers in New Delhi about which, the honourable Supreme Court had to pass a stricture against the government,  we are reminded that we live among people whose thoughts and actions disturb us to the point of distress.  

And yet, in this garden of life, we are to live soberly and not reactively. We live to show another way of living and leading!

Even in a small place where I work, I feel grieved by the sight of people living polarised and not relationally. Those of us who would feel excluded can think of others, who too feel similarly and be friends to them. 

Our life and living is to announce the message of healing, conciliation and togetherness.  

It is sometimes a painful experience because we ought to live with a calling to 'minister and not to be ministered unto'!

People are larger than their behaviour or temperament. Therefore to stay centred on this consciousness is indeed the way forward. 

Don't we see enough goodness around us because of which we can continue to trust that goodness would become abundant when we celebrate doing good as a way forward. 

Yesterday it was gathering cloud and lightning in the evening, when I was in the supermarket. So there was a rush at the check out counter. I was behind two others with two items in my hand. Two of them standing before me had basketful of items. Both of them invited that I check out first. I was grateful for their offer. Having heard them talk about the impending downpour and having to travel home in a scooter without a rain coat, I was not going to make them wait. What surprised me was their kindness to let me check out first even at the cost of an inconvenience to them. 

Becoming a neighbour to others is a calling for all humankind!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)