roses | The Direction of Intention

Beautiful Together [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on September 9, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

The bouquet came with pink roses. We bought it for the daisies. We could find no bouquet of daisies-by-themselves so the pink roses came home, too. After being sorted out, the daisies went one way and the roses another, eventually landing on Kerri’s night stand.

It’s important to keep in mind that my sweet wife is not a pink-appreciating-girl. She’s a black-thermal-wearing, boot and blue jeans girl. She likes her daisies because they are simple. I believed the pink roses would go through their short life mostly unappreciated.

I was wrong. The next day I found her staring at the arrangement. “I really, really like those,” she said. In our house very few things get a double-really. I can’t remember anything in pink that has ever received a single-really. And, more surprising than her double-really was how much I liked them, too. A pop of pink. They evoked a smile every time I entered the room.

“Who knew!” I said, in a fit of reverse-eloquence, adding, “We should always have flowers on your nightstand.” I meant it, too. I’m particularly fond of anything that evokes happiness, especially in these dark days of idiocracy.

As you might imagine, the pink roses were subjected to several photo shoots. Even in their decline they were kind enough to pose for a picture. There is intense beauty in aging if one has the eyes to see it. I suspect the pink roses are teaching me to open my eyes to the beauty in my present age-and-stage. Rather than stare into the mirror and ask, “Good god, what happened to me?” I am now more capable of measuring myself against the moment I am in rather than comparing myself to the 30 year old I imagine myself to be.

I am not that. I am this.

Besides, I was not all-that when I was 30. Why compare myself to a delusion rather than appreciate fully the reality of the moment?

I kiss Kerri on the forehead, telling her, “You are beautiful.”

“I don’t look like I used to!” she deflects my compliment. I considered sending her immediately to the bedroom to have a chat with the waning pink rose but, instead chose another path.

“Neither do I,” I said. “Looks like we’re going to grow more beautiful together.”

read Kerri’s blog about PINK ROSES

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Live A Great Story [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on February 14, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

I suppose I must not have seen the small print requiring an extra fee for the petals to actually be attached to the stems. Silly me. I’m not a detail guy so it never occurred to me that ordering flowers was like flying on Frontier Airlines: if you want a seat you need to pay extra. If you want wings on the plane there’s an up-charge. If you want the roses fastened to the stem, it’ll-cost-ya.

Every story has a context. Without the context a story cannot be fully understood. Here’s the context for our sad-rose-tale. Kerri and I have out of necessity lived lean. Very lean. This is the first year since we met that I had the capacity to send my wife roses on Valentine’s Day. Context number two: since we spend 24/7 together and she monitors our expenses like a hawk (a necessary practice that comes from living lean) , it’s nigh-on-impossible to surprise her. Fromyouflowers.com seemed to be a solution for a long overdue surprise. “How bad could it be?” I asked myself. Woof.

Never ask yourself a question when you can ask other trusted people. I could have asked Jen or Gay or Jay. They would have warned me off. I could have asked them to arrange roses from a local florist and I would have secretly paid them after the fact. I did none of the above. I was having a nice conversation with myself and, left to my own devices, I’m perfectly capable of making a dumb idea sound titanically smart.

The roses (I use the term loosely) came, not on Valentine’s Day (today), but on Friday. Surprise! Gay’s response after seeing the picture truly captured their state: “Too bad they picked them in August,” she wrote. Even the leaves had abandoned the stems. Brad’s comment was my personal favorite: “How efficient,” he wrote, “you received roses and potpourri in the same order.” Efficiency was, after all, my aim.

Kerri, a gifted transformer of lemons-into-lemonade, separated the dead petals from those few still living and put them in a crystal bowl. And then, she offered me this consolation: “Think of it this way,” she said, “if they’d arrived intact, we’d never remember them. Now we have a great story to tell.”

First roses. A Valentine’s tale. We’ve laughed all weekend [I confess, the humor in the story took me a moment or two to see]. With or without roses, on this day of celebrating true love, this is what I know for certain: we live a great story so we have a great story to tell.

read Kerri’s blogpost about NOT-ROSES