Is life nothing more than a struggling Grape Vine?

It has been quite a heavy year. The past 12 months have truly felt like 12 months, but passed as quickly as a day. I hold my emotions together fairly well not because I want to, but because I need to. Sometimes the only thing that you can do is to remain emotionally strong for others, so that when they dip you are there to hold them up and reflect a sense of stability of the situation even when the floor feels like it is crumbling beneath you. Words don’t help… they somehow lose all meaning and feel more like a tin can clinking along the sidewalk (empty).

After getting more news to add to the shit cake the universe has decided to bake for me it was time to take a walk over to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and talk with “The Big Guy.”  I needed to gather my thoughts and unload some of the pain from my shoulders.

St. Patrick’s is going through substantial renovations inside and out. There is so much scaffolding inside that you can barely make out any of the architectural beauty. The pews (benches) in the front have all been taken out and replaced with plastic chairs for the time being. None of this keeps the tourists away though. I walked to the front and made myself at home in one of those plastic chairs. I am not sure if “He” heard me over all the noise the tourists made, and yet I tried to get his attention over and over again. I sat there clearing my head, voicing my frustrations, yelling at “Him” (not out loud), shedding a few tears and then the flash of a camera would bring me back to where I was. I would settle back down and start all over again. I carried on this cycle for quite some time as I tried to make sense of things.

I’ve found myself at St. Patrick’s quite a few times this year… always sitting up front around the same spot. As I sat there today I noticed an image in the tile by the front rows. Never had I noticed it before. I stared at it as tourists trampled over it to snap pictures of the metal scaffolding adorning the Cathedral. I must have stared at it for at least 10 minutes. How had I never noticed it before?

A Grape Vine with a cluster of grapes hanging from the vine.

Do you know why grape vines are grown in such close proximity to one another? It forces them to dig their roots deep… struggling to find enough resources to help them survive in a crowded vineyard. The struggling vines result in lower yields, but lower yields generally result in better grapes for making better wines.

As I walked out of St. Patrick’s with my emotions locked away once more, I thought to myself, “is life nothing more than a struggling Grape Vine? Does the pain and struggle we endure make us better in some way? We can only hope this is the case. If not, then I will have a few choice words when its my turn to walk through the pearly gates.

One thing is certain, just like the roots of those Grape Vines you need to dig deep to find the strength to carry on in situations where you feel like you are being crowded by overwhelming emotions.