Bloom where you're planted. And no matter how roughly you're planted.

Dude, I was in my yard for zillions of hours today.  And you can tell that by looking at me (I still have grass particles stuck to my face) and by looking at my kitchen.  It didn't get much attention today, unfortunately.

Kay.  So I had these flowers called bachelor buttons in one of my front flower beds.  I was initially tickled with them - they were sooo hardy.  And they grew at an astronomical rate.  And they looked cool and were a cool color when they bloomed.  But then I got upset with them, because they grew too tall and covered everything behind them.  And then they started to choke out all the other plants.  They were driving me nuts.

So I took them out.  I had plans to put them into the back flower bed.  But then my elderly neighbor came and talked to me for like seventeen hours.  And the plants lay there on their sides, totally wilting in the hot son.

To add to the indignity, I planted them in very inhospitable soil.  Very clayish and hard.  Nothing much is able to grow back there.  I should have mixed some potting soil in with the clay.  I should have given them a little haircut, too.  But I was out of potting soil, and by the time my neighbor stopped talking to me, sunlight was fading fast and I had to just hurry and dig holes, stick them in, fill in the holes, and get my butt inside.  I also should have immediately watered them, but I didn't.  Too late.  Too busy.

"If they die, oh well," I thought.  And they look HORRIBLE.  I still need to trim them down quite a bit.  They have wilted and died.  They have, as my dandelion weed killer bottle says, "experienced plant death."  And I was okay with it.  I don't like plants that behave like weeds.  It makes me mad.

So today, as I was mowing, spreading lawn food, watering my back plants, and then throwing away the little plastic pots from some callies I just planted out front (I'll take some pics of them tomorrow.  GOR-geous!!!), I saw one of my little bachelor buttons.  One that I supposed had experienced plant death. 

And the dang thing hasn't died.  Well, most of it has died.  But it has a little bit of new growth and even a bloom:

Sorry; it's hard to see the plant with all the stupid ivy and weeds crawling all around back there.  But the point is, this plant has risen from the ashes.  When I thought it was done for.

When I saw this plant, I got all Glen Rawson-ey.  For those of you who don't know, there's this dude named Glen Rawson.  He is kind of a modern parable-writer, really.  He sees these situations in his life, and he goes, "This compares to the gospel..." and then explains the correlation.  And, um....well, I'm not a big fan of him.  Which is really bad of me.  I mean, here he is, talking about the gospel, which, obviously, I LOVE.  And making really great comparisons.  I guess it's his delivery that kind of gets to me.  It strikes me as being really cheesy.  I have a very, very low tolerance to cheesiness.  So it's hard for me to listen when his stuff comes on the local radio station's Sounds of Sunday program.  It's actually just hard for me to listen to Sounds of Sunday, period.  Because a lot of songs on there can be cheesy, too.  Just give me hymns, and I'm good.

Sorry; I'm irreverent.  It's an issue.  I'm working on it.

So back to my story.  I waxed Glen Rawson-ey for a moment.  And I thought about my situation.  I've had a helluva hard week.  One of those I-want-to-wilt-and-turn-grey-and-lie-down-and-experience-plant-death weeks.  But if this little guy can withstand all that I've put him through and still bloom, I can go through the things I'm going through and still bloom.  I can thrust my roots into this nasty clayish soil I'm in right now and just hang on and push through and emerge more spiritually beautiful.

I know, cheesy right?  I'd make Glen proud.  And Nicholas Sparks.  He's cheesy, too.  I'm just sayin'.