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The ROSE and the LOTUSIn a large garden a red Rose and a blue Lotus grew alongside many other flowers,
showering the eye with all the colours of the rainbow.
The Rose
with its beautiful petals grew in a raised area in the western part of the garden.
In this way it could look far and wide, keeping an eye on what was
going on in the rest of the garden.
The ancient Lotus, in contrast, grew in rhe eastern part of the garden right in the middle of a small pond, streching its blue and pink coloured flower up above the water. It just stood there resting peacefully and, unlike the Rose, had no particular desire or interest in watching everything going on around it. It was more preoccupied with itself.
By nature, more introverted.
Of course, the Rose being an extroverted was facinated by the Lotus. Not because it especielly liked or disliked it, but rather because it was attracted to this flower.
To be completely honest it thought that the Lotus was rather peculiar.
And far too passive.
How on earth could it just rest out there in the water, with its roots deeply
embedded in mud without doing anything.
"It probably hasn`t got any roots at all ",
the Rose thought and felt a bit superior to the Lotus.
The Rose had a number op thorns on its stem and it spent a considerable amount of time and energy polishing them to make them look very shiny while telling all the flowers:
" You will never know what might happen, so it`s best to protect oneself ".
And a proper thing to do, so it thought, was to have its
roots firmly embedded in fine fertile soil.
One day
the other flowers whispered to the Rose.
" We have heard that the Lotus is possessing an inner Wisdom "." Inner Wisdom ! "
That made the Rose to laugh. As far as it knew there was nothing between
heaven and earth that it couldn`t experience with its own eyes.
One summer, however,
the weather became hotter and hotter. The sun was shining relentlessly on all the
flowers and many simply withered because of lack of water.
The pond, in the easternly part of the garden,
where the Lotus grew
had seen the water level drop quite a bit, but in no way did this effect the lotus.
It just sat erect as it always did.
The Rose, too,with its hardy roots withstood the heat quite well.
But as the days went by, the Rose`s beautiful petals slowly began to wither.
Its roots felt terribly dry and even the highly polished thorns looked
so very dull and soft and began, little by little, to fall to
the ground.
The Rose looked at itself and grew more and more sad. It began to think eanestly about both
LIFE and DEATH
and in a strange way the Rose sensed a transformation taking place in its Heart.
Suddenly, a thought struck the Rose and it began to laugh repeatedly and so very loud that you could hear it far into the universe.
Without warning it started to rain !
It just poured and poured causing all the flowers to stand erect again.
As the sun filtered through the raindrops, they looked like a
cascade of silver and golden droplets.
The Rose looked in the direction of the Lotus.
Actually, it had been so preoccupied with itself of late, that it had forgotten all about
this blue flower in the pond.
And the Rose was very astounded to see a fresh, new flower streching above
the water from the old Lotus as if it, too, had undergone a transformation.
At that very point the Rose realised what the ancient Lotus had
known all along
and
the Rose saw
" with its own eyes "
a beautiful rainbow
building a bridge
betweenthe ROSE and the LOTUS
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