One of my favorite flowers in my garden are the Peonies. These are so beautiful when they bloom and they smell wonderful but my favorite part is their growing process. They start out as these little purple shoots that grow so fast you can almost watch them growing. In about two weeks time they send up these balls awaiting blooms like in the picture above. They are beautiful as well but the most amazing thing is that these plants are unable to actually open up and bloom without help. They would die if they didn't have the help of one of God's smallest creatures. Ants are the heroes here. They climb up to the top of these flowers and eat a waxy film covering the buds. They feast on it for a couple days and once it's all gone the flower is finally capable of releasing all of it's beauty to the rest of the world.
There are a million lessons we can learn from the simplicity of this fact of nature, but the one I am taking to heart today is the fact that we are not independent planets that are completely self-sufficient. We are only able to release all of the beauty inside of us with the help of others (and no I'm not talking about beauticians and cosmetic beauty). If we didn't have people to teach us what it means to be good and help others we could be very ugly creatures indeed. Most importantly if we didn't have anyone to love or love us back there would be no beauty in the world at all (at least that's what I think).
