by Paul Big Bear
Dear Friends,
“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” Such a simple sounding statement, do you till your gardens in the spring and plant the seeds that will become the flowers you will enjoy all summer? Do you enjoy the colors and fragrances they bring? What about the other benefits that flowers add to our lives; the butterflies, the bees that pollinate and provide us with honey, they very air we breathe? They adorn our tables, our windows, our lives with their beauty. They convey feelings of love and celebration. Red symbolizes love, purple – passion, burgundy – devotion, pink – innocence, peach – thanks and gratitude, cream – charm and thoughtfulness, yellow – friendship, and white innocence and real love. We pick the seeds that will sprout into the flowers of our choice, we fertilize, feed, and water them, we weed and mulch, we share with friends and family. The many beautiful things we enjoy in flowers, how often do we really stop to smell the flowers to truly appreciate them?
“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” Have we neglected our most precious flowers, our children? Have we considered the seeds we plant that blossom into our children, our future? Do we nurture and feed them with love and tenderness, and what about the care we give them, is it sufficient for them to grow straight, tall, and bring beauty to our lives? As our children grow and mature do we smile proudly and encourage them? Do we do enough to protect them from the weeds and pollutions that threaten them? Have we used our life experiences, our learning, to teach them with wisdom and truth? Each flower symbolizes a feeling, carries a message, each child is capable of symbolizing every emotion every feeling, expressing infinite messages, don’t we owe it to them, the messages we are sending into our future, to be sure they understand the truth of how they came to be and not the opinions of those who would plow over our flower beds and pour cement?