Vachon Imagined

She stood outside the flower and thought, I am separate from this flower.

It has thorns; I do not have thorns.

It has petals; I do not have petals.

And because she believed herself separate, she handled it without care. She picked it, planted it, admired it, and sometimes killed it, but she never truly honored it. She never took the time to speak to it, to thank it for its beauty, its thorns, or even its death.

Yet in honoring the flower, she began to honor life itself—the life within the flower, the life within herself, the life within all things.

From this arose a different kind of awareness.

An awareness that no longer saw separation.

It understood that petals and thorns come in all shapes and sizes. The flower’s thorns were visible, but the human thorns were often hidden. They appeared as unresolved anger, fear that had not been surrendered, impatience that had not yet been accepted.

As these thorns were recognized, they softened.

Instead of abruptness, she found patience.

Instead of fear, courage.

Instead of judgment, understanding.

There was something holy in this transformation—not holy in the sense of perfection, but holy in its willingness to serve life rather than resist it.

She used her life to do what it was meant to do: to protect the fearful and the frozen, to protect the children who could not yet protect themselves. The protection she offered others became, in some mysterious way, the protection she herself had long needed.

It was all part of a greater design, one she could sense even when she could not fully understand it.

What she carried for so long was finally laid down.The flower had given her a gift.

Its honor was not in its beauty, nor in its fragrance, nor even in its thorns. Its honor was in helping her see that she was not merely part of its makeup, but made of the same essence.

The same intelligence.

The same life.

The same mystery expressing itself in different forms.

What appeared different was not truly different at all.

The separation she had believed in—the distance between herself and the flower, herself and others, herself and life itself—simply wasn’t true.

None of it was.

Not the separation. Not the division. Not the loneliness that came from believing she stood apart from the world.

It simply wasn’t true.