[bbgapril]

**11. Sometimes you have to let old things go to make room for new ones to grow.**

So like the stupid song says 'just remember in winter far beneath the bitter snow lies the seed with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose.' After any gardener will tell you the first lesson about growing roses is that if you want beautiful flowers in the spring, you have to prune that damned bush back...almost to the ground in the fall. But so few of us have the strength to cut off those final bruised and dying buds of another season. Maybe those bruised flowers smell too sweet...sometimes sickly sweet perhaps? Sometimes we are afraid of getting stuck by the thorns...but the longer you delay the pruning the bigger and tougher those thrones become. After Mount Saint Helens erupted one of the things that astounded scientists was how quickly life returned to the mountain. As desolate and barren as it had seemed right after that eruption within months there were signs of life. Almost as soon as those embers cooled the life cycle began again. So too will yours if you simply have the courage to clean out the old to make way for the new.