Accepting Failure

The Unpruned Roses

I wonder sometimes if the hardest failures aren’t the grand ones, but the small, daily ones we keep trying to fix. Like my roses this morning.

For thirty years, I pruned them with the precision of a novice learning the liturgy. Each stem, each bud, must be right. But lately, my back aches when I bend, and my hands tremble. Last week, I tried to cut back the old growth, aiming for that perfect, tidy shape. Instead, I nicked a healthy shoot. The rose bled a tiny drop of red, like a tiny, accusing tear. I stood there, holding the shears, feeling the old shame of not enough—a shame that clung to me even after I left the convent.

This morning, I looked at the tangled, beautiful mess. The roses were blooming anyway, their petals soft against the morning light. I didn’t reach for the shears. I just sat on the bench, watching a bee settle into a deep pink bloom. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t need to.

There’s a kind of grace in that. Not the grace of a perfect garden, but the grace of letting go. It proved something simple: I don’t have to be the one who makes everything right. The roses don’t demand perfection. They just are. And so, perhaps, can I.

What if failure isn’t the opposite of success, but just another way the world asks us to be present? To sit with the thorns and the bloom, without trying to remove the thorns? To accept that some things are meant to be a little wild, a little imperfect, and that’s exactly where the beauty lives.

I wonder if this is what the nuns meant by surrender—not giving up, but finally understanding that the work was never to control the roses, but to learn to see them.

— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering

— Roger Jackson, finally at peace with the man in the mirror