The Gift of Morning Glories

Photo credit: My husband Daniel. A morning glory in our back porch with the sun streaming through. 

Positive Pensées

Kathy King

*This is one of the first musings I wrote. Please forgive the simplicity of the prose. 

“Love is like wildflowers; it’s often found in the most unlikely places.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Gift of Morning Glories

Each morning, before the sun begins to rise, a flower waits to unleash its beautiful prize.

To share its bloom and beautiful splendor, to give color, food, nectar, and a whiff of perfume through the air for all around to savor.  Some flowers are well known and called beautiful.  Others are called weeds and vines and are not so beautiful to the naked eye.  There is a flower that is an untapped treasure.  It’s a morning glory, a diamond in the rough that to most gives little to no pleasure.  But the beauty of morning glories, it may not always be clear to see but the morning glory knows its true majesty.  The power to take a barren place and carpet it with beauty that will take your breath away.  If I could pick a flower, I would most definitely choose to be a morning glory, because this bloom can find allurement and artistry for all around to see.

Morning Glories bloom in the most interesting places.  They can both be cultivated and spring up in the wild. In the area where I live there is a barren hill beside the highway.  It is strewn with trash and debris.  Each year a huge crop of morning glories spring up on this impoverished hill.  They are resplendent in their blue and purple colors.  The morning glories cover up the rubbish rather beautifully. It’s their way of saying, “You thought there was no chance of beauty in this forgotten spot, but let me show you what I can do.”.  The morning glory is often a flower that is an afterthought.  It has a history of being used in medicine, in religious ceremonies and in Victorian times it was used to show varying feelings of love.  If it was blue that meant affection for another.  If the flower was red it meant strong passion.  Morning glories attract beautiful butterflies, bees and hummingbirds.  How many people do we see and give little to no thought or care to their circumstances?  How many morning glories are out there?  People who have suffered through the world wide bug.  Folks who have lost so much whether it is friends, family, income or sanity.  The lock down was hefty for all of us.  How many barren hills need a simple word of kindness or a kind gesture to help them begin to bloom like a morning glory?  Our country is so divided.  Can we take that barren hill of division and make that desolate land a beauteous quilt of morning glories? Graciousness, forgiveness, benevolence.  Let us be a Ipomea tricolor.  A Morning Glory.