When my beloved sister-in-law, Anne, passed away last year, we added her ashes to the soil at the base of three magnolia bushes we planted in her honor. \u00a0One bush is in our yard, but the other two are in the woods, where they are surrounded by wilderness.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent a lot of time this spring removing the weedy overgrowth from around those magnolias, trying to give them air and light so they can thrive.\u00a0 A strange thought occurred as I was yanking out the ragweed, the nettles, the poison ivy.\u00a0 Those weeds are arising from Anne\u2019s ashes every bit as much as the magnolias!<\/em><\/p>\n What a perfect metaphor. \u00a0We wanted to convert Anne\u2019s earthly remains into something beautiful and perfect, but Anne herself, though quite beautiful, was not perfect.\u00a0 No one and nothing is perfect. \u00a0We humans are always sprouting undesirable overgrowth, and if we want to give the beautiful parts of us any chance to thrive, we must continuously pull those weeds, pull those weeds.<\/p>\n It makes me wonder if I could have done more to help Anne rid her psyche of its weedy overgrowth while she was alive.\u00a0 Maybe then she could\u2019ve been happier. \u00a0Maybe then she might’ve thrived, instead of dying so young.<\/p>\n Ah, well.\u00a0 All I can do now is pull the weedy overgrowth away from her earthly remains and work with greater determination to eliminate the nasty weeds that are choking off my own neglected psyche.\u00a0 And while I work on both these tasks, I thank Anne, once again, for helping me to become a better person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When my beloved sister-in-law, Anne, passed away last year, we added her ashes to the soil at the base of three magnolia bushes we planted in her honor. \u00a0One bush is in our yard, but the other two are in the woods, where they are surrounded by wilderness. I\u2019ve spent a lot of time this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kblaugheed.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}