We have this swath of bamboo in my backyard that is beautiful. It is tall, green, and grand. Looking up at it when the sun hits it right makes you feel small in just the right way.
We hacked down some of the bamboo this summer because 1) around this area, it is considered an invasive, uncontrollable weed, and 2) we wanted to grow some nice-on-the-eyes grass, something a bit more palatable in our piece of suburbia.
We declared success as we laid down sod, the days went by, and nary a sign of bamboo threatened the peace. Phew.
Until. There it was - a tender and strong shoot of bamboo, proudly sprouting right through the damn grass. What the?! I spotted more of them. I tried pulling them out. No dice. Husband tried next. No luck there, either. In the end, he cut them down using the machete we found in our yard when we first moved in.
I continued to check on it in the weeks after, hoping that our efforts had won out, but again, the bamboo won out. We went through this cycle a few times: Cut-grow, cut-grow, cut-grow. The chant that began playing my head each time I saw it went: That fucking bamboo!
But even as I cursed it, there was something that I grudgingly admired about it. It was a worthy opponent. The nerve of it! The persistence! How dare it keep growing?! This tenacious plant, forcing me to look at it and be awed by it, despite it being, by all accounts, a damn weed.
It’s a lot like the human spirit. We can be cut, pulled from our roots, even disappear from the naked eye - and at the end, we are just like that nervy, persistent weed. Tender, strong, grand, and ready to make a comeback, whether we realize it or not.