The more time I spend in a garden the more similarities I see with art, music and poetry.  There is a great deal of art in gardening.  Just like a painter loads his pallet with colors and arranges them on the canvas a skilled gardener paints with plants.  Each plant is a color, each flower a living hue used to inspire and tell a story.  Just like a poet fashions words to communicate a moving story a gardener mixes texture and color to weave a tale as beautiful as it is beneficial.

        A gardener directs a symphony of gorgeous instruments and with each colorful note there is unity and harmony.  Each rich color blends with, enhances and transforms its neighbor into a vibrant bouquet of diversity. Yes, there is some beautiful, soul stirring music to be found as we walk through a dew covered garden.  So it was on this day as I stroll through the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.  Greeted by the birds, bees and butterflies I make my way through a canvas saturated with living color.  A treat as sweet to the nose as it is to the eyes as I am drenched in the perfume of a thousand roses.

        We could learn a lot from a gardener.  A gardener desires a rich harmony, not a colorless uniformity.  He skillfully and patiently places each plant in its place for the benefit of the garden as a whole.  He chooses each flower according to his design and nurtures it as a nurse cares for a patient.  Each plant is different, each one unique, special and filled with potential.  Each blossom, each bloom like no other ever created and not afraid to just be itself as it yields to the skillful hands of the gardener.  Like the flower we too are one of a kind and our Creator has never made any two of us exactly alike. 

        Today, let us celebrate our uniqueness and be thankful for our differences.  Let us not attempt to be like someone else; let us only strive to be the best us we can be.  Realize that each one of us can do something like no one else can do it.  We are distinctive in our skills and talents, gifted like no other in human history and what a shame to bury such a treasure in the dirt of conformity.  No other fingerprint like yours; no voice sounds exactly like yours; you are an original masterpiece; don't waste your time trying to become a counterfeit.  Be yourself and add your voice to the symphony, sing your song, paint your picture, write your story.  Only then can you find harmony and satisfaction.  Happiness is a choice, choose to be yourself.

Something to think about:

• Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of apathy and sluggishness steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

• We would be better people if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

• Conformity is one of the most fundamental dishonesties of all. When we reject our specialness, water down our God-given individuality and uniqueness, we begin to lose our freedom. The conformist is in no way a free man. He has to follow the herd.

• Dare to be what you are and to believe in your own individuality.

• Why is it so many want to be what they’re not while what they are is what others want to be?

• To be nobody but yourself—in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

• No two human beings have made, or ever will make, exactly the same journey in life.

• It is our uniqueness that gives freshness and vitality to a relationship.

• If I try to be like him, who will be like me?

Like everybody else, I am different
Rickey Moore