I never promised you a rose garden, love.  His words echo through my mind.

Everything good in the world.

A rose garden: an image of beauty, perhaps even perfection.  The fragrant petals, the light dew in the mornings, the sunshine, the scent of rich earth.  A rose garden is everything that’s good in the world.

Look a little closer.

Look at the rose garden; really look at it.  Walk through it, fearlessly.  Soft petals don’t last long before they wither and drop.  Thorns hide under brilliant leaves.  Storms rip the roses from their roots.  Sunshine burns and scorches.  The undercurrent of decay is ever-present.  Everything beautiful exacts its price.

All this beauty before us along with its corresponding price.  What to do?  Choose your own type of rose garden, of course.

Hothouse roses.

You can cultivate a sheltered life, wherein you insulate yourself against the outside world.  You can cocoon yourself away from the world’s harsher elements and live quite nicely.  You’ll miss out on some of the richer aspects of natural roses, but you’ll also avoid their strong thorns.  You can create perfect, cultured, fragile beauty.

Wild roses.

You can jump headlong into life’s wild ride; living free and never looking back.  You can experience everything before you and then some.  You can seek out more and more, living in the extremes.  You’ll have indescribably beautiful experiences, as well as some at the other end of the spectrum.  You can create wild, complex, tortured beauty.

A rose garden.

You can create a purposeful life, wherein you tend your rose garden.  You can’t control many variables, but you can control your response.  You can choose what to plant, when to till, where and how to prune, when to water, how to weed, what to protect and nurture.  You can create purposeful, meaningful, personal beauty.

What kind of beauty do you want for your life?  It’s yours to decide.  If you change your mind you can start again.  Be sure to make your roses a place you want to call home.

I never promised you a rose garden, love.
Oh but darling, you did.  And I thank you.