The GARDener &the flower

A story about nurture, perspective, and relationship

This is a story about nurture.
This is a story about perspective.
This is a story about giving before taking.

It came quietly, and I offer it here in words and in voice because stories sometimes hold what explanations cannot.

This is the story of a gardener.

And a plant unlike any ever seen before.

The plant blossomed flowers of extraordinary colour, of shades so vivid they felt alive. To see them made you want to smile, even on a difficult day. To stand near them stirred something deeper, a remembering that life holds more than what we chase.

Its fragrance lifted the spirit. Not only with sweetness, but with perspective. It carried the feeling that the world is vast, and that meaning cannot always be captured or owned.

The gardener had no expectations when he planted the seed. He simply tended to it.

He nurtured it.
He protected it.
He gave his attention and care without knowing what would come.

For him, the reward was watching it live.

Its beauty was not something to possess, only something to witness.

One day, a visitor entered the garden.

They stopped, astonished.

“Why isn’t there more of this?” they asked.
“Why don’t you grow it everywhere so everyone can have it?”

The gardener answered gently.

“I don’t know how to make more,” he said. “It simply came to be. Perhaps its purpose is not to exist everywhere, only here, only now.”

The visitor felt unsettled by this.

As humans often do, they struggled with the idea that something beautiful might exist without belonging to them.

Instead of allowing the experience to remain as memory, they began to want it. To claim it. To recreate it.

They forgot that each place carries its own gifts and that longing for what is not ours can make it difficult to see what already is.

So they cut a branch from the plant without permission.

They believed they could grow more of it elsewhere. Perhaps they could preserve its fragrance. Perhaps they could multiply its beauty.

But life does not always survive separation.

During the journey, the branch withered.
Without its roots, its colour faded.
Its fragrance changed, becoming something heavier than before.

What had once been vibrant became something else entirely.

Perhaps this story is not about one visitor or one garden at all.

Perhaps it speaks to the ways we relate to what is rare, what is beautiful, what feels just beyond our reach.

Perhaps it reflects patterns older than any single moment, patterns of wanting, of reaching, of forgetting how to stand in relationship.

Our minds are quick to notice what is missing.

We scan for what we do not have. We move toward the next brighter field, the next extraordinary thing.

When something brings joy, it can be difficult not to want more.

And yet, the hunger for more has no natural ending.

In that endless reaching, it is easy to overlook what is already alive in our own care.

There are gifts in every garden.

Some are meant to be shared.
Some are meant to be witnessed.
Some are meant simply to exist.

Perhaps the question is not why we cannot have the flower.

Perhaps the question is whether we can learn to stand beside it without cutting it away from its roots.

I offer this story as reflection on how we nurture, how we reach, and how we continue learning what it means to live in relationship.