Back

A Rose garden | Day 181 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Jun 30, 2023· 2 minutes

🇩🇰 Also available in Danish 🇬🇧

My mother-in-law has a garden with beautiful roses. We went one beautiful morning, the same day we left Sealand, to spend some time with my husband's parents and say goodbye. The roses are lush, rich, and wild, and we enjoyed them as we enjoyed the company of loved ones, the sunshine - and the roses.

Roses are one of the garden disciplines to enjoy. Why do we even do it? There are so many flowers out there, wonderful as they are, blooming rich and colorful and easy to grow with no effort. Roses are delicate, vulnerable, and unique. They take time; they take skill; they take effort, they take feel.

Humans have bred roses for a long time, and we enjoy them very much. We stop to smell roses, look at roses, take pictures of roses. To be invited into a rose garden is a beautiful thing, an honor. Walking around the roses, we walk around an incredible achievement; hours spend on beauty alone.

To the rational mind, it could seem entirely off to grow roses. Still, there is something deeper in the human mind than reason, and roses - all of them - are such a great reminder of what is truly important, of how complex life is, and of the importance of stopping to enjoy and appreciate love and beauty whenever possible.

So, we stopped to enjoy my mother-in-law’s roses and the company of my children's grandparents, and as a bonus: Their friend visiting from the States, a kind and inspiringly intelligent human being whom we appreciate very much too.

It is never really fun to say goodbye to loved ones, and the ripple effect did show its hard face the following days. But we did it. Said our goodbyes and went off to get the van ready for a 100-day road trip starting that same evening.

Love and light

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad

🇩🇰 Also available in Danish 🇬🇧 

Thank you for reading
I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our life like this, and we get very happy when we get feedback from you. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

Life rarely goes as planned—and in unschooling families, that’s part of the point. In this conversation, Sandra Dodd, Cecilie Conrad, and Sue Elvis e…Read more
The work-life-nomad balance includes a lot of moving around. A lot of adapting. A lot of driving in our case, as we are based out of our van. And som…Read more
What counts as a resource when you don’t follow a school curriculum? In this episode, Cecilie Conrad, Sandra Dodd, and Sue Elvis look at how unschool…Read more
How it all ties together: The unschooling, the love, the strategies, the stories. And how we ended up studying math while driving on the Autobahn fro…Read more
What happens when fully unschooled young adults with no preparation and no big planning suddently decide to enter the educational system? And how doe…Read more
Did I also write about love yesterday? Is there anything more important—will there ever be anything else at the center? Read more
With our usual delayed precision, we drove to the airport at the last minute to do what I believe is an international tradition: to be there when the…Read more
It seems our tribe is spread out all over. We find the right people scattered around the globe, and we find that being nomadic is as much about retur…Read more
I see confidence, creativity, fun, self-exploration, adventures, thoughtfulness, learning journeys, and passionate commitment to connections everywhe…Read more