Weeds in the Flowers

When I was a kid I liked straw flowers.  Those stiff little blooms you could pluck and flatten in some big book and pull out later to examine and remember when you picked it, planted it, or just the color you liked so much.  There was a little patch of dirt behind my parents' house next to the gas grill and I was bound and determined one summer to grow straw flowers.  I got some seeds and threw them around, watered and they came up.

These little guys grew like crazy, but they were planted in a haphazard way so I'm sure there were some undesirables growing in there too.  I didn't much mind, it was mostly flowers and their little buds and blooms were starting to come out pretty.  About that time I went to band camp, as usual; my Mom and Dad would water the flowers.

After huffing and puffing, making a racket and getting sunburned all week, I came home full of dirty laundry and needing a nap.  My folks got a funny look on their face though, as I stood there in the living room.  Dad started with "Honey, Pat meant well, she said she saw some weeds in your flowers and just had to pull them up, she couldn't leave the weeds in that flower bed".  I looked at him and swallowed hard.  Pat was our neighbor directly behind us.  She must have seen me taking care of that plot all summer.  What happened?  I raced out the side door and around to the back.  I can still remember standing there shaking, looking at the little straw flowers lying on the ground wilting, not proudly standing with their buds to the sky.  It was over, they were dead.  Pat had pulled up every-single-one.....there were weeds, their little shriveled bodies were lying around baking in the August nightmare too.

Weeds, she killed every flower she watched me tend through her kitchen window all summer long because she HAD TO get the weeds.

I've gotten off and on a lot of merry-go-rounds since then, and I've tried figuring out what stuff like "spirituality" and "consciousness" is.  But it sometimes comes back to the weeds, the feeling that nothing can ever be truely right in my looking to the Univerrse if I've got weeds in my consciousness plot.  And I seem to find ways to tease out the bad message that it's worth it to just destroy myself in order to dig 'em up.  But how's the good stuff to grow if you tear up their roots trying to get it "right"?

I don't know, and I'm probably not going to find out, but I feel like writing about it.