Flowers of Resilience

Hi everyone! Hope you are all staying sane and haven’t passed out yet from the Clorox fumes. I sometimes wonder how much poison I’m inhaling each day. Yikes! Anyway, I actually have something more serious to share.

Thank G-d for Trader Joe’s! Although I haven’t been there in two weeks, on my last shopping trip to the store, I picked up some flowers for shabbos. You know, the kind that’s supposed to last forever. Well, last week, I certainly wasn’t going out to get fresh flowers and the flowers still looked great so all I did was change the water, pruned a few wimpy looking petals and displayed the rest. Recycled I guess, but still, the shabbos table was more complete. Well, today I took another look at those flowers and thought to myself, what to do now? I really want flowers in honor of shabbos but don’t plan to go out anywhere to get them. Once again, I changed the water, threw out some more stems and wilted petals and salvaged what I could to make the bouquet look it’s best in honor of the upcoming shabbos queen. And you know what? It made me think of all of us and what we are currently doing now to make the best out of a tough situation. We may be down, but we are certainly not out. We may have had to drastically change our routines, rework our priorities, stretch our supplies, and discard things that are not absolute necessities. But through it all, we have also discovered much beauty. We have learned that we are strong, capable and resilient. We are gaining a new perspective and much needed reminder of who and what really matters . We get to spend more time with our loved ones even if we are exhausted and don’t look our very best. Perhaps it’s breakfast time or dinner time where we now get to sit around the table together or maybe we get to take a walk in the middle of the day. Perhaps it’s family game night or maybe it’s bonding over laundry chores. But as we draw ourselves indoors with our family, we connect to our inner souls and to each other with a depth we may not have seen in a while, if not ever before. And that is something to treasure. So maybe my flowers won’t be the most beautiful or the freshest looking this shabbos. But they have an inner resilience that is much more beautiful to the heart.