Rose petals. I don’t collect them. Passive little things that they are, they simply drop off the bloom and collect themselves in languorous little stretches across the floor. Sometimes, in exasperated tones, I huff out the first syllable of “Really…” which, were I to complete my exhale, I mean to follow-up with a stern “Must you?” But, reaching down, I don’t get past that initial contact of dry skin on those petals.

And I am lost.

The rose I love most was among the ones we rescued from my parents’ home just before the new tenants took charge of destroying the carpets and sinks. It – and its friends – took up the back of the little truck, probing into my ears with each stop and start from Montreal back home. You’ll love it on the farm, I tell them as if they had been extracted from a disastrous setting. In truth, they seem to have thrived on the neglect, unlike my mother who had left for her own journey from hospital to long-term care. I, on the other hand, firmly believed they were bereft and pining (oh evil pun) for my father’s evening companionship and his obsession with every leave and petal.

There’s no real evidence that the rose I call Dad’s rose was truly his. Besides, we know that one cannot own a rose. They are actually quite indifferent to all that attachment – as I often wish I could be. Regardless, I came to believe it had been passed on to my care. A bloodline from somewhere further back than Shakyamuni, flowing through innumerable nurseries of stock roots and grafts, to be propped up in the back of my truck nodding at passing cars. It’s sad, really. I might have been better off had I not impressed ownership by claiming a birthright or planting it in a bloodline.

But there you have it. I desire to be embedded in a bloodline that flows backward and forward. Because what would we be without something that carries us along, that holds us as if it is always forever. Because all our very best intentions to pay attention to our stinky attitude don’t stand a fig of a chance at the rose petal’s soundless dropping off. Practice, if you will, the breath, the posture, the yells-bells-smells of your preferred rituals. (Don’t get me wrong: I love the dance of chants and circumambulating a rectangular room made circular step-by-step.) But, in that moment when you hear the sound of one hand dying, will you live the lesson the untamed rose petal has been offering season after season?