The Rose and the Thorns
“Did you know that when it snows
My eyes become large and the light that you shine can be seen?”
Kiss from a Rose lyrics by Seal © Perfect Songs Ltd.
How to handle a rose:
Dealing with yourself is a little like handling a rose.
You are like a rose — sublime, with languid folds of crimson petals… Beautiful…
Deep red, totally relaxed, and confidant with its beauty and place in the world.
But as if to contrast this beauty, the thorns await anyone who would seek to mishandle it. Unbelievably sharp, the points are the second thing you learn as a child about the rose.
Thorns have evolved in nature to protect the plant from being eaten by herbivores. It’s a pretty effective survival adaptation in a world where life is always trying to overtly steal resources from other living beings, up to and including the actual eating of the other life form itself.
Appropriation of the rose’s resources are pretty effectively stopped by their evolutionary development of a simple mechanical defense system — the thorn. Woe be the herbivore that attempts to…
