Each year I wait for this out breath: Little buds on my father’s transplanted roses that signal another year of surviving the harsh winter.  I remember agonizing over whether to bring the roses out from their beds in Montreal where they were coddle against the warmth of the bungalow’s foundations and brought to life each year by a more temperate climate.

These roses had been planted by my father in the back gardens of their home and were a showpiece of the neighbourhood.  And, typically, they were also a focus of some warm-hearted competition with their neighbour who managed to grow some of the most beautiful tree roses I’ve ever seen.  All summer long, Bruce and Dad would go on about the best way to prune, cultivate, and feed these plants.  The fence between their houses fell to disrepair.  The crabgrass invaded one yard as the dandelions parachuted into the other.  And they argued on – sometimes about the weeds but mostly about the worthiness of the floribunda over the hybrid tea.

After my father died (has it been ten years already) and my mother’s dementia left her planting the florist-delivered long-stem red roses, the house was rented to a stream of people and the roses – by now considered heirloom varieties – died.  With only five bushes left, I became obsessed with possessing them.  But the possibility that rescuing them would also kill them stopped me at the planning stage until one year I decided to dig deep and commit to whatever outcome evolved from my action.

It’s not enough to step up and take a chance.  There’s the follow up, the follow through.  Call it what we will, the real work begins after the commitment is made.  We know that about pets, plants, and people important to us.  But what about our own lives?

I suggested to our meditation group that we learn to fall in love with ourselves.  Embrace ourselves as we would a lover – filled with enticement and wonder at this being we are.  Seeing every act and engagement with ourselves as inspiring and vital to our life.  Someone commented to me that it seemed egotistic.

That’s the fear we have, isn’t it?  That self-love is a slippery slope to self-centeredness and narcissism.  So we withhold, become Scrooge-like in our tenderness to our hurt and sorrow.  And when that deprivation becomes too intense to bear, we react through grasping and greed.

Perhaps a considered approach would yield more nourishing fruit.  Preparing the ground each day to receive the treasured aspects of ourselves, to be held, watered, and feed so that healthy growth is possible.  Patience when we are dormant to our potential and welcoming when there is sight of aspirations that lean to the sun.  What might happen then?