It was a simple picture that grabbed my attention.
It was a rock
split open

Through the crack
rose
a beautiful flower,
blossoming.

It is a picture I saved
returning again
and again
to sit with it.

I don’t know what it was
but it haunted me.

Maybe it is
the resilience of life.

There are many science fiction movies about how life survives. Nature endures.
And if we could only step aside and trust in nature, life will find a way.

Life will find a way. May life find a way, beyond and through and around all the destruction.

There is something lovely about faith in life, faith in nature, in creation surviving.
Faith in life and love and nature… thriving.
Particularly at a time when we seem to be teetering on the very real possibility of demise.

Sure, God created the world to be good.
Is it still good?
Do we have faith in the goodness of the world?
This flower affirms my faith in that goodness.

And there’s more.

There is something about the way that these Muslim sages teach us to see the outside as the inside, the heavenly as the earthly. We live in an enchanted universe, with here and there all mingled.

The great Rumi reflected on this same theme:

Don’t claim in spring on stone some verdure grows
Be soft like soil to raise a lovely rose—
For years you’ve been a stony-hearted man
Try being like the soil now if you can!

So this flower is inside us
We are the rock
We are the splitting
We are the flower blossoming through

It is all us
It is in us
It is from us

What if we came to see the rock
as our own heart?
A heart that was once
so hard

Perhaps it broke
Perhaps it broke open

And what was once just a crack
Became an opening

Yes, there is a crack
in everything
in everyone
in every stone
in every heart
that’s how the light gets in
As Leonard told us
As Rumi told us

But there is more:
The light gets in
And the flower gets out

Sometimes the rock itself
softens
becomes the soil
the flower is rooted in

Even if your heart was once
hard
as a rock
May a thousand flowers
blossom through its cracks

Blessed be these cracks
stones turning into soft soil