Unscented Life

Don’t give or send me roses. The sentiment was always in the sweetness of their smell, alluding to love’s sweetness. No longer. They are a dead cut flower, destined for wilting and discarding in the trash, never to be thought of again. The hard work of the most beautiful of natures treasures has been reduced to a symbolic vision alone. Is a rose once its essence is gone?

Would humans be human, if our essence was removed?

Roses used to have the most gorgeous fragrance. Myrrh, green tea, fruit, powdery spice were the scents that enraptured us through the ages. The flower itself was natures most intoxicating and graceful picture of the beauty of life and love. There was nothing more resplendent than a rose’s bud in its transformation to flower.

The rosebud is a promise.. It surprises us in its becoming. What is a dark peach, tightly wound tear, slowly and patiently evolves and shows its naked beauty, one petal at a time. As she reveals herself, she a metaphor of life in just that one act. The entire rose herself tells life’s story. Birth, from a bud, maturation into a beautiful flower to fragrance the air, and then the decline, once exhausted from her show, into her dormancy. Her thorns speak of humanity’s and life’s perils, warning that a thing of beauty is still to be navigated carefully and thoughtfully.

As we age and mature, we become who we will be in full adulthood. Our rose, in summer, experiences the same, he petal revealing what the fully open flower remain in her mature form. In most unsuspecting ways, a bud may from one color, change to a completely different hue or color altogether.

Roses, like life and people, come into contact and are surrounded by other flowers, as humans do with other humans. They are visited by pollinators that created new variations of that rose and future roses. Men and women as well interact, to create new beings, varied versions of themselves.

In its fall and winter, we see our rose whither and age, then lay dormant as if dead, waiting for its rebirth, in spring, new, renewed and fresh.

Humans like this rose, spend life interacting with others. Humanity pollinates in a manner of speaking. Interaction and others in close proximity, flowers and people alike, change who they are. This either makes one or the other more robust or less, more beautiful or less so. In neither case, are they left unchanged. We grow. We blossom and bloom. Botanical or human, the process is similar.

As we age we wither unto death. Our rebirth comes in children and grandchildren. While we do not blossom again, we do in a small way, continue on, in our offspring. They are the ones that will bud, blossom and bloom sharing their fragrance with the world we leave. Are we leaving it better, nurtured, fed, and thriving, or are we depleting all the good, to leave a flower susceptible to pests, and blight? We want to enjoy the flower for generations to come. We want our children to enjoy that flower and its loveliness.

But where has the rose’s scent gone? A flowers perfume disappears in a flash of a moment. It is a wisp in air, smelled recorded in our mind and heart, and then gone.

Humanity is the same way. We come into this life, among millions of others. Our incense carries into the air, in that same wisp of air the rose shares. Some of us smell sweetly, while others smell bitter, or repugnant. Each has its purpose. Each contributes its share to life and the living. The problem is, that we have lost our essence, our pleasant aroma, and leaving only the bitter and sick smell behind. We have the power to make our scent memorable and lasting, a sweet longing for more. Instead we chose ruin, we eliminate, we take something of divine beauty and destroy it for no one else to experience or enjoy.

We have removed the rose’s scent through hybridization and manipulation, making to less enjoyable, for everyone. We learned how to nurture a rose to flower, for its appeal, only to take away the pleasure it offers in its sweet bouquet.

We can no longer enjoy its perfume, the symbolic smell of love, that for centuries, inspired poetic verse. We have removed its pleasure. A cut arrangement is a bunch of dead beauty, never to scent a home, never to bloom. It’s imprint into our psyche through an integral part of our living body will not longer be recorded in our minds, never to invoke a memory, a feeling or emotion. Is it still a flower if it offers no romantic recollection, no smell tied to love, to celebratory events, or even to grief?

Man changed life and joy in the same way. We have taken the beauty of living and manipulated it for consumption, for destruction, for purchase and for death of the human spirit.

Humans have an uncanny way of trying to make things better, to make something new and improved, only to gain nothing worth noting. We invent, modernize, in the name of advancement, only to devolve, bring to ruination or extinction.

Inventions like computers, mobile phones, have not blossomed people, but made them reclusive. Reclusively, life is not lived, enjoyed or savored. It wilts. We are social creatures who no longer socialize. We don’t feel for humanity, because interacting with a screen does not teach you empathy, love, kindness, collaboration or tolerance.

Men have decimated bees with modern chemicals, so too, they decimate society, by isolation in a prison of innocuous ones and zeros. The inadvertent and indirect extinction of the gentile flower or other plant life bees pollinate, foreshadows our future.

We have deflowered the rose, which has no lure for its symbiotic friend. We are killing off the manner in which all of nature survives.

We have and continue to kill of our own species for political, racial, religious, ideological sensibilities, with the same shortsighted knee-jerk temperament. Maybe we need ti take a cue from our little rose.

She accentuates, enlivens, perfumes, benefits and blesses the world and life she graces. She does not seek to be the only rose or even a species of one color or type. She adapts and becomes etherial in her approach to offering peace and rest. She calls to pause, to contemplation, to patience, and appreciation when we, with intention, stop to gaze upon her and savor a deep breath of her, when we admire her and notice that not every petal on her one flower is the same and another. Is it so difficult for us to think when considering fellow humans?

The rose no longer scents of love. Once cut, it no longer lives, but becomes a decomposing piece of waste. There is no pleasure in the flower, that we have been said to improve, or modify. To remove the essence of the flower, you make it less. You take its unique identity. It is now just a flower, that will no longer have a history of joy and pleasure to be treasured. If it is a symbol or love, then love has no fragrance. Love is a dull and dying bouquet.

Man makes humanity less. We kill, rob, adulterate and mold everything to our liking without consideration of consequence. The rose does not. We remove the essence and beauty of perfection, as we remove life for what we deem better. The rose does not care for such things or engage in such horrors.

She, the rose, gives of its beauty and scent to the benefit of all, even man. Man benefits man alone and is even selective of what man is worthy. The rose does not choose to alter life, but to be at peace with it, to enhance it and share its beauty. We continue to be self seeking, uncompromising and unrelenting in our desire to overpower all things.

The consequence is not unknown. The ultimate end is our own.

But nature will have her due. She will, in the end, survive us, overtake it once again. She has seen us bring her treasures to extinction, she will witness us as we bring about our own.

Her rose will then be free to be a rose, to fragrance life, perfume the air with sweetness, again.

She will return. The rose will still smell as sweet. Love will again, be scented by her perfume.

#humans #life #love #humanity #relationships #society