Castle Love

Somehow, she knew she had to break free from her own trap.

She'd been happy to make it back then. Content to let it grow its vines around her turrets and set roots into her crevices.

The trap was her marriage. She had welcomed it and honored it when it began. Opened her yawning maws with a smile of gratified contentment that it would be a "good thing". It was so little, such a pretty little thing. A little bereft looking and a little bit lonely, she let it envelope her and was not unduly dismayed.

She even fought for it when fronds seemed to die off and wither away. She would have a healthy growing trap if you please! Not one that was a dead, chaotic tangle of exposed woody vine matter showing its ugly face to the passing world! No way! So she tended it. Watered it. Loved it through her daily sacrifice and gentle subjugation of her walls and boundaries.

The Vine was voracious.

It demanded more space from her daily. The creeping, wriggling little vine-lets with their soft cute growth seemed so pretty but in truth were a malevolent force intent of using her to fortify it and strengthen its resolve to conquer her ramparts.

Pieces of her started to fall away. First she lost tiny pebbles of respect but ignored them and refused to shore the walls from where they fell with the mortar of self respect. She allowed the vine to eat away at her, sucking the clay from between the stones of her resolve, making those very stones dangerous to passers by.

She became weak, vulnerable, and impossible to predict! She was not "safe" anymore. Something in her forced others away from her. She became abandoned and derelict, a sad excuse for a castle on a beautiful hill. The Vine seemed content but found it harder and harder to be fed by her. It had taken so much of her core, her "glue" from between her lovely stones... it was hard pressed to find more. It demanded from her ever more; urgently, it required she meet its needs and not ask anything of it in return.

The castle had to do something drastic!

It stopped feeding the vine. It prayed to the Sun who answered her prayer with a difficult challenge and an awesome opportunity. The Sun came and dried the mortar that was left between her stone walls into hard, unyielding clay such that the vine could not penetrate with its voracious little roots. The castle solidly stood its ground and waited under the parched sky as the land around it began to suffer and burn under the relentless heat of change.

She was immutable however. She accepted the stinging warmth of the blazing sun on her flagstones and just waited!

The vine shriveled. It retreated its green down to the first few stumps of its original growth, spluttered and then almost died.

And there she stood. Grey and unwelcoming, covered in the very thing she had always feared the most...those withered bare roots encasing her like the trap she had always thought she would enjoy if it were green and alive!

A gardener passing by saw this and made a fated decision. He tore away the vines. He poisoned the last remaining clinging roots so they could not return. He brought in people who could re point and renovate the castle to her former glory. He brought her out of her trap so she could be herself again. Free to be as she was meant to be without restraints or demands.

The castle rewarded the gardener and gave him the heart of herself...her very soul deep in the interior of her being. There he made his home and they both found deep contentment and joy even in the hard times. The gardner did not need the Castle but nor did the Castle really need the gardner but they were simpatico and they grew to love each other as love should be expressed. No demands just a gentle decision to care for and meet a beautiful thing where it wanted to be met.

The gentle rains came back and the hill was verdant and aesthetically marvelous once more. Life tread out a steady rhythm of freedom and safety such she had never known or understood until then. No more would she need to subjugate herself in order to keep something alive! She was loved for who and what she was and was not required or expected to be entrapped by it.

Beware the roots of pretty green things you only think will serve you well.