“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” ~ Marilyn Monroe
Spring is my favorite season, as I’ve said it time and time again. I know, I’m being a bit repetitive. 😉 Right now tulips are taking over the landscape in Chicago in the typical early spring fashion.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t crazy about tulips. I thought that they were fake roses. Silly, right?
My mom had a great appreciation for every flower – of all the things I inherited from her, I’m most grateful for our shared love of flowers.
She especially loved both tulips AND roses. Tulips were more accessible and abundant. In the spring, our yard was full of tulips, but roses were the flowers that we only saw in photos or smelled in the scent of her perfume, too expensive to buy and too difficult to grow. Tulips were the “easy” flower, thus not good enough in my ridiculous childhood brain. You plant a bulb once and they take care of themselves, remembering to come up from the earth every spring in their own symmetrical perfection.
For whatever reason, I thought that if something was easy, it wasn’t good enough. My own spin on the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” – wanting something that I couldn’t have.
As an adult, I now love tulips! I don’t think it was an “ah-ha” moment where I realized I liked them, but more of a slow growing acceptance in getting to know and appreciate tulips and roses individually for who they are in their own unique ways. Even though I grew up thinking that tulips were impostors to roses, they’re completely different flowers and don’t deserve to be compared to one another. One is a bulb that grows from the ground, the other is a bush. One requires very little care once planted, and produces sturdy flowers, while roses are more fragile and require more care
I now see the experience with coming to love tulips and not comparing them to roses parallels my own journey with self acceptance. Through my practice of Reiki I have come to love my own unique expression of my Authentic Self.
The Authentic Self is who we truly are at the core of our being. However, that is often hidden by the outside layers, the ways we think others want us to be. This can be oppressive. When we allow our Authentic Selves to shine, we’re happier, full of peace, and connected to our true purpose in life.
So in other words, if you’re a tulip, don’t be a rose. 🙂
Photo of pink tulips by Cafe Brauer in Lincoln Park Chicago, April 20th, 2021, taken by me.
