Ragworts: smelly poisonous weeds? They carry a lesson for me

It's my friend Rachel's birthday, and I've written this as an inspiration for her:

There was a time in my life when I looked at the scraggly yellow ragworts that broke through the cracks on the city pavements or straddled the old decaying brick walls and railway cuttings of Leicester and wondered … wondered at just how they survived this arid, urban waste and I thought of my own life at that time … nothing, nothing seemed to be happening … the long days seemed monotonous, unexciting and the ragworts gave me hope indeed. Even in this ‘waste’ I could find life … and so I did.

I was working as a cleaner cum shop assistant and discreetly, near my side, I kept a notebook in which I jotted down my ideas, my thoughts, my plans, my stories … and so the dullest place became a place of inspiration. 

 Now I know the reverse for life is busy and, yes, fulfilling but I still want to take inspiration from the ragwort and learn a lesson from its tenuous rootedness, its ability to find life when there seems so little life around.  I need my roots to push deep down into the soil and this means finding God’s inspiration in everything I do. In the parched times or in the downpour, God must be my soil, my sun, my rain, my life.

Postscript: I’ve just read that just one single plant of a particular type of ragwort can produce up to 150,000 seeds in its lifetime! These scrawny, golden, fetid flowers can multiply, multiply, multiply. So with us: just where will the ‘seeds’ of lives given to God be carried and, when they take root, what kind of fruit will they bear?