Hi y’all. I haven’t written in a while. Life has a way of refocusing your attention. When I get overwhelmed, I turn to the garden. Since I’ve been distracted recently, my azalea plant was overtaken by kudzu.

    <<<<<<My azalea with the addition of kudzu.

I saw this vine last winter, but didn’t think too much of it. So, it kept growing and in this past month, the vine finally covered the entire plant. So, I started cutting it back today.

  <<<<<<Cutting down the kudzu

I realized I had to cut it down at the root level. To fully get rid of it, I need to dig up the roots. Although, I’m pretty sure the kudzu will always be here and I’ll have to continue to cut it out. That is its nature.

Now, I finally have my azalea back:

Now, why am I telling you about this plant? While I was thinking about cutting the roots and the vine, I was also thinking about the recent events in Charlottesville, VA. What transpired there was absolutely horrible. It’s still hard to believe that nazis were marching just north of me. In a town in the United States of America. To me, the kudzu is just like hate. It grew and grew and thrived while I wasn’t paying attention to it. The hate that people hold within themselves does the same thing. It starts out small, it may always be with us, but we can usually keep it under wraps, but when it is fertilized it sprouts and grows. Then, it’s out of control. I believe I got to the azalea in time and there’s no permanent damage, but now I have to make sure to trim back the kudzu when it gets out of hand. As you can see in one picture above, there is kudzu lurking on the fence behind the azalea.

That’s what we have to do when hate gets so out of control that we cannot talk to one another anymore. The violence I saw in VA made me very sad. At the end of the day, we are all human and we should be able to talk about our issues. But, hate is another thing entirely. Feelings of hatred towards groups of people can lead to discrimination, which is illegal. Prejudice is the belief and discrimination is the act. We may never squash all of our prejudices, but we can choose not to discriminate and we can choose NOT to harm one another. We can also choose not to fertilize our hate.

TETH