Today I was driving home from school and flooded by the thoughts of all I had to do this weekend, out of the corner of my eye I noticed I was driving through what looked like paradise. The grass was literally emerald green. The light was shining. There were flowers blooming from the trees, and I felt this sense of enchantment that I have not felt in quite some time. What really caught my eye though were the dandelions sporadically growing here and there inside this emerald beauty. Little spurts of sunshine creating a pathway on the green runway.

My mind was immedietely brought back to a poem I had modeled for my students earlier (a Haiku actually) where I took the topic of "weeds" and transformed it into a green demon. And earlier this week, I found my Haiku to be pretty okay since I was trying to model this idea of metaphors and personification at the same time. However, as I was driving by the Emerald Green, I could not help but realize how wrong I had been in my initial modeling. This tends to happen often when I think about a previous lesson, I also think about the nine ways I could have changed the lesson to make it better. I suppose this is the whimsy in reflection. 

I think, after talking to many people today and listening to their stories, we are sometimes so easy to pass off a good soul as a weed or our own problems as being weeds. We are so quick to see the Dandelion as a negative force, that we sometimes fail to even listen to what it is we do say. Today was the perfect example of transforming the perspective of a weed into a yellow blossom. We learn much from grouping others based on our judgements or excluding others using our weed spray. And I think sometimes those "weeds" continue to appear because we are meant to use those weeds in a different way with a new perspective. 

Don't work on eliminating weeds from your life. Work on finding the weeds in your life. Listen to them. Cultivate them. Watch them grow and realize that what may appear to be a weed is simply a beautiful sunrise (Dandelion) in disguise.