Resilience and Adaptability
Finding inspiration from the oft-rejected.
(This post takes a seemingly opposite view to the last one, Tilling the Ground, or, rather, uses a similar metaphor in a different way.)
Nature often provides examples that can be used, both on the literal level and taken symbolically, of models, inspirations and ideals. Even those things which are fought against and rejected can yield wonderful material in this regard. The subject of (so-called) weeds, for instance, that gardeners so often love to hate, is a case in point.
Take the Dandelion, for example. Here is something that is not fussy about what it needs to grow. If conditions are hard, soil is poor, competition severe, and if it is pulled up, it simply rejoices, as it were, and grows the more, or grows again.
Never will you see a Dandelion flower without a sunny disposition. And it sends its roots down, extracting nourishment from the depths, laughing at stony ground. Its fertility is marvellous - a myriad seeds with their parachutes that are blown whither the wind wills. And wherever a seed lands, either on seemingly favourable or unfavourable ground, it simply makes the most of it, and begins its life work of growing.
Can I too, inspired by such fortitude and lust for growth whatever the conditions, even the worse the better, also rejoice in struggle, the spice of life?