I'm a Survivor

One of the things that the sheep did was to eat everything in sight.  While this was good for us, in that we never had to mow the lawn, neither did we enjoy the bushes on the property because they were so chewed up, we didn't recognize them.                                                                               
                                                                                 Then we added a puppy into the mix and things just deteriorated further.  He ate drywall, shoes, socks underwear and got himself so worked up about being tied up (because he ate garbage too) on garbage day, that he mangled the hydrangea bush close to the tie-down - running around and around it until he was completely stuck. All that was left of it was one stick coming out of the ground.  He also ate the Japanese maple that we planted outside our bedroom window. We made the executive decision to uproot the poor plants and put them out of their misery.  The hydrangea, we relocated out of mercy  (and we thought we were a little crazy).  The Japanese maple was thrown onto the compost and we replaced it with another less tasty version.  We also put some rocks around it so the new one wasn't so easy to get at.

Imagine our surprise and our delight when a few months later, we found the Japanese Maple growing on the compost pile. It was immediately rescued and given a special pot of its own.  And I talked to it a lot.  I told it how proud I was that it was so resilient and didn't let circumstances dictate its survival rate.

And then we found the hydrangea bush with a little leaf on it a few weeks after that.  More celebration took place.  We cheered and hooted and hollered - and let that little bush know that we were all on its side.  It took us very seriously and has begun growing in earnest.

I call these plants my Survivors.  I actually have more than these - like the Impatiens which came back into bloom even though no one watered them when I was on holiday.  And the pansies which got eaten in the spring by slugs and came back in the fall to prove their point.

In these little stories, I find life lessons.  Bruised and battered, or almost-dead from no watering, or taken down by outside forces, it is possible to survive and not only that, but to thrive.  Sometimes this takes external encouragement, but it is also important to reach down inside oneself and pull out the ability to survive the damage that life hands out.  It's not always a matter of blooming where you are planted, but blooming in spite of where you are planted.