Searching for Beauty

Photo by Diana Turner-Forte, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Southern Pines, NC

A rose is a rose is a rose. — Gertrude Stein

My middle name is “Rose” not for any astrological, poetic or even mystical reasons. In our front yard a dormant rose bush showed its first bud on my birthdate. And continued to bloom until I left home for Canada some years later.

It’s curious how cycles and change transform us and memories of something as simple a rose blooming on your birthdate holds such tender meaning, throughout life. To this day, the sight of roses fill me up with an overflowing feeling of joy that’s hard to put into words; the delicate, soft, velvety petals, and the distinctive scent all send me into a state of pure bliss just from being around the flower.

I used to give my young dance students a single rose after a performance instead of the traditional carnations. I believed this gesture taught them to appreciate the simplest things after weeks of grueling rehearsals. In truth the rose was really more representational of their hard work with its elegance and delicacy, even with thorns on the thin stems. After the complexity of weeks of hard work which often included sore feet, sometimes even blisters from pointe shoes, achy muscles, overtaxed brain cells, and extra rehearsals all led to a near perfect production. In comparison the rose symbolized simplicity — contained in the work of commitment and dedication to an art form and attaining certain level of excellence in a particular style of dance. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking all of those things as I was rushing around the day of the performance purchasing flowers, but it was perhaps an underlying Ideal.

Regardless, as I’ve matured I’ve discovered and appreciate even more the rose and some of its symbolic meanings: love, friendship, beauty, and balance. A single rose has served as a means of turning a challenging day into one in which to lean into the possibilities of a situation, or to endure a sadness too deep for words, knowing that the turbulence will pass just as the flower being held.

Perhaps, through the sharing of roses, I was attempting to offer my students an Ideal that can often become diluted in the rigorous training required in classical ballet and is best expressed in this excerpt from Louisa May Alcott’s poem, “The Rose”:

Give me a rose, / a rose , oh, a rose, / That speaks Love in every breath, / And whispers joy in the very depths.