Once upon a time a beautiful garden sat gracefully next to the porch of the master’s manor. The royal master tended it daily, taking great care as he pruned and watered the plants, creating a masterpiece more delightful and more lovely than any other garden in the kingdom. Spring was approaching, and so the master went to the garden and planted all the seedlings that were to grow that year, among which were a red tulip and a pink rose. The two grew from infancy, ignoring one another and watching only their own stems grow. Neither could recognize beauty, and neither could recognize love. And neither recognized each other.

But as they grew, the tulip gradually took notice of a beautiful rose. He saw it there, several inches away, further than he could stretch his leaves. It is impossible to describe the desire that he felt, the warmth that stretched through his stems and out of his petals, the passion that swelled through his every bud. He stood there, growing skyward, finding that the pain of the rose’s ignorance caused him to stretch his leaves further and grow greater. And yet it remained out of reach.

  There was also a third flower, a white lily. She spent her time alone, watching the brilliant Sun shine down on her, dripping its glorious light upon her every being.  She watched neither the tulip next to her nor the weedy grass beneath her. Only the holy Sun. And as she watched the Sun, the weeds beneath her slowly wrapped their roots around hers, wrapping them tighter and tighter, suffocating her life without her knowledge.
The tulip watched as the rose grew higher and higher, more magnificent with every day, more beautiful and more majestic. The lovely, warm red of her petals attracted him with a sensation beyond anything else he had ever experienced. He could not fathom how animals, with a beating heart, could endure love if he, as a plant, felt so deeply without one. The desire swelled inside of him, growing greater with every passing moment. His passion seemed too heavy to carry, his soul pulling so hard to the heavens that it felt his roots were barely keeping him grounded. He felt as if he should stretch out his leaves to catch the wind, bend his stem, and then let the winds of the world snap his body. At least then he would drift into the roses petal in one last dying pleasure. But he fought the passion. He endured, just waiting for the moment when his branches were long enough to reach his love.

The lily, meanwhile, began to feel the pain of the weeds. The throbbing started small, then grew to a raging violence inside of her. The circumstances of her life, all of the suffering that she was sure the gardener would have pulled out by now, began to tear her apart from inside. The agony of suffocation, of looming death beneath her, grasping up out of the ground like corpses trying only to pull one more down for company, began to consume her every being. Her pain seemed too heavy to carry, but the desire of getting closer to the Sun kept her stretching, kept her enduring, kept her grasping on to the few threads of life that the weeds had not choked out yet. She pressed on, just for a few moments of the Sun’s light that made all of her suffering worth enduring.

And then, one day, the final, fatal wind came. The lily’s stem snapped, and her body fell into the petals of the tulip. Suffering often delivers us to the place of love, a home, a refuge, that is often out of glimpse. Perhaps even the opposite direction from where we’re looking. As she broke, the pain of the weeds too strong to endure, the master provided solace in the arms of the tulip. He caught her, looking down at the one he had never noticed, one far more beautiful than the rose he had been stretching towards for the past months. As she landed in his arms, he looked away from the rose, and instead lost himself in love for the pure white lily. And, as much as two plants could, they kissed. Their petals melted into one another, and the lily was brought once more into life. And in that moment, in their holy marriage, the tulip forgot all fantasies of the other rose, and was so overjoyed that the wind had brought him the wife he never dreamed of existing.

The master looked out of the window at his garden, a garden that looked to be dying with its weeds but was actually blossoming with love. Blossoming with a love purified by suffering, blossoming with a love that none of the plants inside of it could ever have predicted a month before. And the master grabbed his gloves and descended into the garden, tearing his hands as he ripped out the thorny weeds so that the flowers could finally experience true, purified love in the perfection that he intended them too. A perfection where each flower could hold one another in its petals, and could be held by the tender hands of the master.