Flowers

Every spring I get excited about planting flowers in my outdoor clay pots. Winter is a long season of no flowers and I really miss them during that long cold season of dull colors. So, each spring I visit my local nurseries and hardware stores and drool over all the lovely brightly colored flowers that will go into my clay pots.

Living in Arizona with its hard rocky ground makes it difficult for an inexperienced gardener like me to plant in anything but clay pots where the soil is rich and guaranteed to bring me some successful planting. Let me add here that I don't have a green thumb. I have sadly struggled with this fact for many years, yet each spring I eagerly plant my little flowers in their respective pots then cross my fingers and hope and pray that they make it through the season. I have been prone to over water them, giving too much care sometimes, but my biggest issue has been planting the appropriate flowers for the appropriate conditions. It took me a few years, I'm embarrassed to say, to finally ask the guy at the nursery what flowers do best in the shade and what do best in the sun. I don't know why this took me so long to realize, but it did! When I finally figured this very important detail out, my flowers, which did well in the shade under my backyard trees, would thrive for the entire summer season; sometimes well into the fall. This completely energized me to buy even more flowers and pots with each following year. Now I have a wonderful selection of flowering pots in both my back and front yard. It brings me great joy each day as I water and tenderly care for them. So, you can see why each spring I get excited when the first flowers begin to show up at my local nurseries and hardware stores.

On one particularly beautiful spring day I was driving down our main street and thought I would take a glance at the outdoor garden department of our local Lumbermans. As I drove by, I noticed the flowers looked especially full and colorful, so I decided I would  stop by the next day and buy a few. That night at dinner I told my husband that I saw some beautiful flowers at Lumbermans that day and that I wanted to get some for the yard the next day. He looked at me kind of funny and said, "Lumbermans burned down a week ago." I was shocked and told him no, it couldn't have because I just saw all the beautiful flowers in the garden department as I drove by. He told me that the garden department was the only thing that had not burned. The rest of the building was destroyed; completely burned to the ground.

Now, I'm a great observer of things and hardly miss seeing anything so this deeply disturbed me that I might have missed an entire burned down building. So, to comfort myself I thought maybe he was slightly mistaken and that the building might still be there, just the inside had burned. He reassured me the building was gone.

The next day, eager to see what I might have missed, I again drove past Lumbermans to see the damage. The building looked like a bomb had hit it! It was completely gutted and the only thing left was the garden department with all of its beautiful flowers hanging nicely from their hooks and resting peacefully on their shelves. I was amazed that the only thing I had seen the day before were the flowers. My mind was so focused on the beauty that I didn't see the destruction. I had to laugh at myself and my ability to see only what I wanted to see. Beauty was where my focus was, so beauty is the only thing I saw. It's been a great metaphor for my life and I learned a lot more about myself that day.

We all do this, see only what we want to see, but how often do we choose to see ONLY the beauty?

Hands

When I was a child I would bite my nails. One day when I was about ten years old, my dad looked down at my hands and said to me, “Your hands are too pretty to be doing that to them.” From that moment on I never bit my nails again. I didn’t want to disappoint my dad, but mostly I wanted to see what he saw, pretty hands. My sister had long beautiful nails and I wanted my hands to be as pretty as hers. All it took for me was a commitment to finally notice my hands, which I had never really done before the day my dad made that comment.

My nails did grow over time and I began to appreciate that feminine look that longer nails could offer, but my nails weren’t as pretty as my sister’s. I don’t know why, but they always seemed to break in odd ways or look ragged. I just couldn’t seem to keep them the way my sister kept hers. I also had eczema, a terrible skin rash that seemed to deform my fingers with its burning red crusty rash that got between each finger. My hands always hurt from this. And, although my parents tried to ease the pain of it, there was never a cure for it, so it became my childhood shame. I would sit on my hands a lot to prevent people from seeing the swollen red painful hands that embarrassed me constantly. When someone would see my hands, they would often ask, “What’s wrong with your hands?” As a shy child who only wanted acceptance from everyone, this was devastating for me, so I hid my hands.

As a young woman in my early twenties, my eczema became so bad that I would have to sometimes wrap my hands in bandages before going to the grocery store because I didn’t want anyone to comment on my ugly hands. I looked like I had third degree burns at times. This was the most painful time I had ever had with my hands. Finally a doctor gave me a strong cortisone cream and this finally cleared up my terrible rash, but the scars of self doubt and not liking my hands remained for many many years. I continued to hide my hands for a very long time ashamed of the physical scars the rash had left behind.

Occasionally I would see my hands in pictures of me and think what lovely hands I had. My fingers are small, slender, and delicate. Rings have always looked good on my delicate hands. After realizing this, sometime in my thirties, I began to paint my nails and pamper my hands more. I was finding an appreciation for hands that had once brought me so much pain and shame. I could finally shake someone’s hand and feel good about it. You never think about things like that when you have had nice hands all your life, but a terrible skin rash makes you painfully aware of every touch; every physical encounter. I was now beginning to feel the freedom of my hands and how wonderful it felt to not hide them, but to actually celebrate them.

Just a few years ago I noticed my hands had begun to change. The small joint on my pinky finger on my left hand was beginning to swell and ache. I did some research and found out that strong cortisone treatments could be causing this reaction. So, although the cortisone in my twenties had taken away a lot of my painful rash, it was now possibly causing a different kind of pain, a deterioration of my joint. I can’t be certain it was the cortisone, but I’m sure it did have something to do with it.

I was disappointed to see my beautiful little finger looking misshapen from the swollen joint. But, more than that the pain was very uncomfortable at times, especially while cooking and doing the dishes. After about a year the pain began to go away, but my joint remained large. My little finger now had a permanent bump on it. And now my other pinky on my right hand is doing the same thing making anything I do with my hands painful at times. I’ve also noticed sun spots showing up on my right hand. My smooth skin is now becoming blotchy with spots. And, my veins are protruding more. My hands are showing age. They don’t look as delicate. They are looking like the hands of a woman who has touched a lot of life.

It’s not easy to watch my hands change. It took me years to even want to look at my hands and then when I finally did appreciate them I learned to love their smooth skin with long graceful nails. Now I look at them and wonder whose hands I am seeing, their appearance is changing so much.

This may sound trivial to most people, but to a woman who has been ashamed of her hands for a good portion of her life and then finally found beauty in them, this is an important realization; that my hands are changing and I am finding a new way of looking at them.

In my desire to always see beauty in everything, then I will see beauty in my hands no matter how old they get or how much they hurt because these hands have touched a lot of living. These are the hands that have touched my newborns the moment they took their first breaths. They have held a sick friend’s scared hand as she lay dying from cancer. They have offered comfort to crying children and baked them cookies to soothe their pains. They have felt the last breath taken as my little dog left us and held our new puppy two weeks later as she kissed and kissed my hands. They have baked cakes for weddings and birthdays. They have stroked my husband’s hair as he has fallen asleep after a long and stressful day. These hands have decorated celebration tables for many special occasions. They have hugged, soothed, wiped, cleaned, offered hope, typed my thoughts, made me tea, planted flowers, touched the sky, felt the ocean.....

These hands have known beauty, because they have touched life. My hands are beautiful hands.

haiti

My first opportunity to find beauty is with the events in Haiti. I don’t wish to simplify or ever diminish what is happening there. It is devastating. There are no words to describe the pain and suffering that they are experiencing right now. It is difficult for me to watch any of it on the news because it is so very painful. Suffering is beyond my comprehension. It is a part of life, but a part I cannot make peace with. Not yet.

Haiti has been a relatively invisible country with a government that has let its people down in many, many ways. The people of Haiti were suffering long before this massive earthquake, long before any of us tuned in and cared, long before the planet shined its spotlight on it. There was a need, a deep need for some compassion, hope, and deliverance from oppression and pain. This earthquake, as devastating as it is, brought world attention to a place that has been quaking under an oppressive government rule for a very long time. The long term suffering of its people has gone relatively unnoticed by the world that is now responding to its cries. How many times do we only pay attention to something after there is an emergency situation that grabs our hearts and demands our attention?

What if there had been a world desire to end the daily human suffering in Haiti before it became a world event? Lights are shone on the places that need attention and that have needed attention for a long time, so we either do it now or do it later and usually the later is when we are answering a call of gigantic proportions.

The beauty I see in this devastating, beyond what is incomprehensible suffering, is that NOW the light is shining on those that have been suffering for much longer than any of us really know. NOW the suffering can stop and lives that have never had a voice and never really known freedom can be seen and heard by the world. Sometimes it takes a BIG shout out to be heard, but it is being heard and now the world in it’s amazingly compassionate way IS responding and sending in the aid this country has needed for so long. Being seen is the gift here. Being responded to is the beauty. And because of this, there is now hope for Haiti.

Please let me know how you have found something meaningful and beautiful in this event. -Rojdnan

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