You Possess a Greater Beauty Than Any Rose

“Everything must find fulfillment or perish.”

Ernest Holmes, This Thing Called You

In This Thing Called You, Ernest Holmes says that a “rose exists to express beauty.” I believe this is also true of humans. We exist to express beauty; in particular the beauty of love—a love that can only come from within us. And yet, it seems we spend much of our time expressing ugliness—an ugliness that, likewise, can only come from within us. Why is this? Well, maybe it’s because we aren’t finding fulfillment in our own personal beauty.

If we aren’t finding fulfillment in our own personal beauty, we are slowly perishing within ourselves. With each passing second of each passing day, we lose touch with the great love that resides within us. We disconnect from our life-source and from our true selves. An empty space develops and that empty space is quickly filled with sadness, bitterness, frustration, fear, hopelessness and all of the other necessary ingredients for inner-ugliness.

If you find yourself feeling more inner-emptiness and ugliness than love, get in touch with your disconnect. Remember, everything must find fulfillment or perish. If you are not feeling fulfilled, where in your life have you disconnected from yourself? In what ways have you disconnected from yourself? Do you understand that in disconnecting from yourself, you have also disconnected from your Higher Power, and from others you care about?

Take time to reflect on the idea that you exist to express beauty. What is it within you that is keeping you from expressing beauty? A rose doesn’t have to do anything to express beauty beyond being itself. A rose simply is. And by simply being, it expresses great beauty. A rose flourishes from within because it finds its fulfillment from within itself. It needs nothing from outside to flourish, aside from rain and sun, earth and sky.

We, too, need nothing from outside to flourish, aside from rain and sun, earth and sky. Sometimes the rain or sun we need comes in the form of a hand to hold or the loving smile of another. And sometimes the earth and sky we need come to us in the form of grounding ourselves in the bigger picture of how we all fit into this life. It means seeing that, like the rose, we don’t need outer-approval to be rooted in ourselves and our own personal beauty.

Roses, in all of their beauty, receive lots of admiration and praise from humans. They need none of it. They rely on none of it. They exist in their great beauty autonomous from all outside opinion or approval. And they reach the pinnacle of fulfillment in their beauty with nothing more than inner-love (i.e. their inner-connectedness to a Higher Power and all of the elements around them) and outer natural nourishment. Once a rose has reached its pinnacle of fulfillment, it begins to age, to fade and to perish as all of life does.

Follow the example of the rose. Look to your inner-beauty and love it enough to bring it naturally to the surface. Find you approval inside of yourself and grow with it into the fulfillment of being who you are: Something much more beautiful than a rose.