Archive for May 1st, 2011
Roses and Relationships
Rose in Qing Feng Gong Yuan, April 2011
I went for a walk in a different park yesterday, the Qing Feng Park in the ZhongLou district of the city. It took a bit of extra effort in locating the park, especially since I can’t read Mandarin characters. The park is much different from the central park in ChangZhou, Hong Mei Park. It’s more about trees, water and walking. Of course, like everywhere in ChangZhou, there are flowers. The first of the season’s roses are now beginning to bloom. And so, I found this one which is for you, my readers.
This rose is symbolic to me of relationship. I gave my wife three roses for a wedding bouquet almost forty years ago. For me, the rose is also symbolic of the feminine. The blossom reminds me of the pull that the feminine has upon the masculine, how one is drawn into the blossom in order to both find completion and to find extinction.
Like all healthy men, I get pulled into relationship with an “other” with the belief that the “other” compliments me, fulfills me, completes me. I fall in love. Like other men, I found that the “other” does not fulfill or compliment or complete. Rather, the “other” is just that, another human doing the same thing. We can only fulfill our “self”. Only we can be responsible for our psyche, for our soul. We cannot lay the responsibility for that on another person and use “love” as the excuse for not being self-responsible.
Relationship then takes on a different agenda, one that is more like the rose – a dance of budding and ripening and then hibernating in mock death only to be rekindles with the warmth of a new season’s sun.
