Posted on by Tenneson Woolf

The Rose Growing Over the Fence

It’s a meandering walk, this one that I’m on with my friend Charles. We are on Edgecliff, named for it’s nearness to the steep drop from land to Puget Sound. We have time today. To be slow. To be free to notice simple beauty together. That’s what friendship does. It animates a certain quality of attentiveness. And of course, some other things.

I love the way this rose looks, having climbed 3-4 feet, and now hanging over this top rail of wooden and weathered fence. It’s beauty, dare I say, its moment of offered friendship, also animates attentiveness.

There is beauty, pretty much everywhere, if we are willing to look. This is one of the conversational wanders that Charles and I are in. Except, of course, when there isn’t — trauma too is real. Or hardship. Or completely stuck.

Charles and are sharing stories about work, about life, about silly things, about serious things. Because, well, there is always a story. And there is delight to share it and to be heard in it, those personal stories that have climbed and flowered over the fence for each of us.

I have the impulse, that working and being together as humans — in jobs, communities, families — it’s messy, yet with inherent beauty. It takes just a bit of noticing to perhaps reclaim, or welcome, the way that it animates our attentiveness.

I’m glad for that. And walks. And roses over fences. And friends.

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