Bloom Where You Are

In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely wildflowers blooming along parts of Oracle Road. They’re scattered in patches, but the blue and yellow and pink colors certainly add to the joy (!) of driving on Oracle. Recently my wife and I pulled into the parking lot of a storage company on that same road, drove around to the back of the building, and slipped the car into a narrow parking spot. Getting out of the car, we glanced over a metal railing, down into a rocky ravine, a naturally wild piece of ground, and saw this. And more.

Now, this is not the most spectacular sight among the flowers growing along Oracle Road, but it stopped us for a “thought minute.” Look at this beautiful spot, we said at the same moment. It is unseen by drivers going up and down Oracle Road, completely out of sight. It is wild and unkept. It’s a “nowhere” place. And yet, it blooms. It’s as if the colorful wildflowers were saying: It doesn’t matter where we are. We are flowers and we are going to be flowers; we are going to bloom. What you see in the photograph is just one wild plant among many in that narrow, insignificant slice of earth. We counted five different kinds of plants, all doing what they are meant to do…bloom. And they did that very well in an anonymous place, without the intention of being admired. Anyone else pulling into that back parking lot and seeing us taking pictures down into a obscure ravine might have thought: “Poor senior citizens. They’ve lost it.” What they wouldn’t know is…we found it.

Lots of implications from this brief experience. Name a few for yourself. And while you’re doing that, don’t forget to bloom today. You were made for that.