Flowers In The Desert: A Lesson In Recognizing Love

Has love ever knocked on your door and you doubted whether you should open it or not? Maybe you doubted if it was true love, or something else. It is not always easy to recognize love. How can you be so sure of that?

With this story we show that love can be confusing, but there are signs that can show you when you try to plant and water something that is not a flower.  Enjoy this story!

Camila lived in the desert and had never seen a flower.

One day a flower shop opened in a nearby desert. They also sold fruit and vegetables, but Camila did not notice them. She was just amazed by the flowers ; in the end she wanted to know what it was like to admire and smell one! According to her family from the countryside, there was no other feeling in the world that could be compared to this.

Slowly she looked through the catalog of seasonal flowers and noticed a flower with very thin, reddish, violet petals coming out of a kind of bud with green leaves. “Oh, what a beautiful flower, and what an ugly name,” Camila thought when she read that it was called a thistle .

Camila was embarrassed to order the flower

When she called to order this flower,  she was too embarrassed to call the flower by its name and say “I want a thistle”, so she described it instead. In less than half an hour, the delivery man came on his camel and gave her a paper bag.

Camila did not know, but what the deliveryman brought was not a thistle, it was an artichoke. She lifted it up to her nose and did not smell any intoxicating scent. The petals, instead of being delicate, seemed rough and cold. Still, she wanted to put it in water, just in case it needed time for the violet petals to come out of the bud.

It was a very sad week for Camila, because every day she went to look at her “flower”, but what she saw was that nothing, nothing at all, had changed. And then came a tragic day: The artichoke began to rot.

How can my family and friends say that it is so satisfying to have a flower, when it has only caused me worry and sadness? Camila asked.

She buried what was left of the artichoke in the desert with a short ceremony. After a few days, she recovered  and encouraged herself to try another flower. “Maybe a more resilient flower will make me happy ,” she thought before flipping through the catalog.

Another attempt after the first error

Camila found another flower with purple leaves that according to the ad was quite resistant to high and low temperatures. It was called ornamental cabbage .

But this also struck her as an ugly name, so again she described it  to the florist.

After 20 minutes, the exhausted delivery man gave her another bag and asked why she made him travel through half the desert for a simple cauliflower.

From the description, the operator had understood that what Camila wanted was a purple cauliflower, and because she had never seen a flower, she thought it was some kind of the cabbage she wanted, until her “purple moss” became bad.

Again she put the cauliflower in water to keep it alive, but instead the cauliflower began to rot and gave off a bad smell.  “Oh, that’s horrible!” exclaimed Camila the day her tent was contaminated with the stench. She buried the vegetable in the desert – without a ceremony – and called her older sister, who had been working in a garden when she was young.

How to recognize a flower

“They were not flowers,” her sister assured. “I do not know what they were, but they were not flowers. You can recognize a flower because it is undoubtedly beautiful and it definitely smells good. This is always the case. “Except if you do not take care of it, of course, then it will wither,” she continued.

She ended the conversation by saying, “When you see a flower, you will  no doubt recognize it. ” Months passed and Camila dedicated herself to other things, where she took up old hobbies and friendships. When she had almost forgotten flowers, someone knocked on the door.

Flowers always come without warning

It was the delivery man. He had just delivered vegetables to the tent next door, and  he had decided to give her a present, since it had been so long since she had ordered anything.

The man took out a purple plant in a small ceramic pot from the camel’s saddlebag. Camila was in awe: “That, that… it is a flower!” She exclaimed as she saw it up close and inhaled its aroma. “It is unique, intense, as if I become one with the flower when I smell it,” she said.

The supplier smiled, and when he left on his camel, he was glad he did not bring the beetroot he had first thought of giving to Camila.

The message of this story is clear: love cannot be argued for or doubted; it is there or it is not there. Love comes without warning and fills you with happiness. If it looks like love but gives you doubt, it can not do any good for you, and is clearly something completely different.

* Original story by Mar Pastor