Petals

As trees begin to cast off their leaves in my neighborhood, I’m reminded of an experience with a young friend. She had a flower with a lot of bright, delicate petals. As I watched, she plucked the petals off the flower and scattered them with exaggerated grace, delighted by the way they tumbled to the ground.

In just a short time, there were no more petals left. She paused for a moment. Then, she picked up one of the petals and tried to reattach it to what was left of the flower. Of course, it just fell back the ground. Tearing petals off a flower is a lot easier than putting them back on.

A lot of us probably feel like that flower. We’ve been torn at by other people, or by a variety of circumstances, and we want to protect whatever petals we have left. We feel vulnerable, so we do what we think we need to do to protect ourselves. After all, there’s no putting petals back on the flower.

Maybe some of us are unintentionally like my young neighbor. We tear at other people’s petals without intending harm. It might be one way we try to protect ourselves, by having sharp enough thorns that people leave our petals alone.

But people are not flowers. If anything, we’re more like the trees that shed their leaves when the daylight lessens and the temperature drops. In healthy conditions, new leaves eventually grow. And the tree is just as vibrant and full of life as before.

We usually show up in community with one another missing some petals. Very few of us are in full bloom all the time. We get trampled, or subjected to harsh environments, or bruised in any number of ways. I have to think that we keep showing up in community with other people because we have hope. Hope that we can be soothed and nurtured back to fullness of life.

We can’t put our petals back on. We can’t put other people’s petals back on. But if we are intentional about creating a healthy environment with the right conditions for wholeness, we open the possibility for new leaves to emerge.

Which is why we’ve been talking about courage so much. It takes a lot of courage to show up with only half our petals and allow other people to soothe and nurture us into new growth. And it takes a lot of courage to set aside our own defenses and focus on how we’re cultivating beloved community and abundant life for the people around us.

Sometimes we act like there are two kinds of people: People who need care, and people who provide care. When in reality, we are both kinds of people, all the time. Maybe one of the ways we create space for new leaves to emerge in our own lives is by creating the kind of environment where new leaves are likely to emerge in other people’s lives.

If we’re all committed to doing that for one another with some consistency, we might just co-create the wholeness we envision for ourselves and the world around us.