Healing Rose
My most vibrant memory from my trip to the Philippines in 1987 was 24 hours of feverish hallucinations and trembling chills under a thin banana cloth blanket in a sparse, stone hostel room outside Carmel on the island of Bohol. My team partnered with three college interns, two male and a female. I woke momentarily to the concerned gaze of my Filipino friends. They shared a legend, a story about a girl who was ill but was saved when her lover hiked to top of a precarious mountain to pick a magical rose that healed her. A few hours later one of the workers stood beside me with sweat matted hair and a wild pink rose that he had plucked from the top of one of the Chocolate Hills. My fever had broken and pink roses became my favorite. They speak to me of healing and friendship and faith and the stories that cross cultural boundaries. Stories of hope and love and miracles rise from the roots of every culture and from the souls of broken people everywhere.
I shared that story with my son who held it in his heart and cherished giving me pink roses not just for my birthday, Mother's Day, Christmas or other special occasions, but on tough days when I was grouchy, frustrated, and tired. He would change the aura of the entire house by showing up with pink roses. The healing touched him, my daughters, my students, everyone I was in contact with on those difficult days. Today my heart aches for my beautiful son. I buy myself roses and wait for their healing touch and look out to the places in the world that hurt like I do...places like Carmel that was rocked by an earthquake not so long ago and Syria that is overcome with the horrors of civil war and I offer them a rose and a story.
How about you? Where would you lay a rose today? At the feet of a child weeping for his parents after a typhoon destroyed his home? or in the hands of one of the lost children of Ukraine or at the door of the Brazilian woman whose home was demolished to make room to transport the world to the upcoming World Cup? or at a child's grave or before the child's mother who longs desperately for her son? The magic in the rose is not in the rose itself, but in the love and in the stories and compassion flowing from them interlocking hurting people with each other, so we can find the strength to keep loving and hoping and offering healing to everything that is ill in our worlds. The question is if we are willing to walk precarious mountain paths to pick the healing roses for our world?
Oops - It was 1987 not 1997 that I was in the Philippines last - this is why I can't teach math and seldom test over dates in history class. :-)
ReplyDeleteStephany - your post is so very moving. I will always look at pink roses differently. The image of the man having gone to Chocolate Hills for a rose for you is beautiful, and the connection between that experience and your son is poignant.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to lay pink roses for a former student of mine whose mother is battling an aggressive form of leukemia. And for the refugees from Syria. The families awaiting word about their loved ones on the Malaysian flight. I'd like to send one to you, too.
Thank you for sharing.
~ Jen, Colombia group
Thank you so much Jen!
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