Blooming in the Rocks

My friends and I and everyone I read and hear about are flowers blooming among the rocks. We all have limitations, even barriers, and we bloom anyway, up into the sun, from right there in the rocks where we’re stuck.

Write the name of any famous person in the window on your Internet search engine and read about the personal hardships and limitations that made the life that person created and each creation within it all the more intense and beautiful.

Think about Hellen Keller—deaf and blind—who authored books and was known throughout the world as an articulate source of inspiration, strength and comfort.

The great composer, Beethoven, wrote his most dynamic symphonies after he became deaf. For him, composing music was an agonizing struggle, reflected in his music.

Imagine the doubt and pain the famous author, Louisa May Alcott, must have had, thanks to her father who believed her to be demonic. Yet she proclaimed, “I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." As an army nurse during the Civil War, she contracted typhoid, from which she nearly died, and although she recovered, she would suffer the poisoning effects of mercury, contained in the drug used to cure typhoid, for the rest of her life. Throughout her lifetime, she supported her family with her writing and died at the age of 56.

The great impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir suffered from arthritis during the last two decades of his life. Unable to move his hands freely, a brush would be strapped to his arm to allow him to paint. In that condition, he even began to work with sculpture!

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter who suffered from a genetic condition that prevented his bones from healing properly. At age twelve, he broke his left leg, and two years later, he broke his right leg. Both legs ceased to grow, while the rest of his body continued to grow normally. Unable to participate in his father’s active lifestyle, he focused, instead, on sketching and painting, which he did at the famous nightclub, Moulin Rouge. He devoted his life to art and alcohol, and died at the age of  36, leaving the world with sketches and paintings of people who frequented the Moulin Rouge, pictures that would be printed on millions of sheets of stationary and hung as posters all over the world.

Think of everyone you know well and consider the rocks they’re stuck in. Think of the ways they create their lives and the gifts they give to you and to all the people who know them. Then list your own limitations and the ways you’ve been blooming anyway, all of your life. Then think of how much more blooming you could do if you stopped wasting precious time trying to move the rocks you’re stuck in!