Roots and Pink Roses

Last year, when my daughter was having her bat-mitzvah year in school, one of the projects she had to do was a family tree, including stories about her illustrious ancestors. Let's just say, my daughter should have got a triple A for her creative writing talents on that project.
 
I stowed her beautiful, imaginative project away (ready to plagiarise it mercilessly when my next daughter hit batmitzvah) – and I sighed a deep sigh.
 
A couple of weeks' ago, G-d did me the massive favour of letting me to go Uman again. My trips to Uman are always surprising, usually in very unpredictable ways. One thing I learnt a long time ago is that nothing that happens in Uman is ever 'random'; there are always very big reasons behind even the smallest details and so-called coincidences.
 
For reasons that you'll see in a minute, let me tell you that a month before my trip to Uman, I started painting a picture of pink rose buds, following a thought that had come to me in my personal prayer that this picture would somehow heal me, and particularly my roots. I had no idea where that thought came from (and yes, sometimes I do wonder if I'm bonkers…) but I like painting, so why not?
 
The other thing to tell you is that the week before I went to Uman, I signed up to do a professional aromatherapy course, again following a steer I got in hitbodedut that fragrances and plants was a great way to help heal people.
 
So I get to Uman, and I was assigned roommates with three other women. The second night, one woman started discussing her illustrious ancestors, and how much emuna they had, and I have to admit to feeling pretty jealous.
 
The next day, I got chatting to this woman, and she asked me where I'm from. "London." Ah, good. Where is your family from, she wanted to know? "Morocco." Ah, her too! What was my family name? I told her – and this is where it turned quite surreal.
 
It turns out we were close relations. I don't know a lot about my ancestors, but the best guess was that our grandparents were brothers. She started telling me all this amazing stuff about my holy ancestors (the same ones I'd been so jealous about the night before…) and how our shared surname meant 'chachma elyona', or something like 'spiritual wisdom.'
 
Apparently, my ancestors were known for being very straight, and for not being all that interested in the physical world; most of the time, they were thinking spiritual thoughts and were caught up in Torah and mitzvoth.
 
I found all this stuff fascinating, for a lot of reasons, but the real kicker was still to come. Apparently, the family came from the Moroccan town of Skoura, which is an oasis with a lot of palm trees and roses.
 
In fact, Skoura is so famous for its roses, that there is a rose festival there every May, and 20,000 people pack into the town to experience it. But that's not all: apparently, my family trade was making perfume.
 
When I heard that piece of news, I went extremely weird, because literally five days before flying out to Uman, I signed up for a serious course to learn aromatherapy. That thought came out of nowhere, but now this 'cousin' was telling me that my ancestors had been working with aroma for eons.
 
When I got back home, I went off to the library to look up pictures of Skoura, a place known for its fortresses and roses. The view was simply sensational – very strong earthy colours, against a dark blue sky, with the snow-capped Atlas mountains in the background. But most amazing of all were the pictures of the roses: pink roses where everywhere, as far as the eye could see.
 
I came home, and finished painting my picture of the pink rose buds that I'd started more than a month before.
 
G-d is sending us messages all the time, some more subtle, and some more obvious. Hitbodedut, or personal prayer, is the only way to decode them, and turn them into action. But we have to trust the information we're being sent by G-d. Now, I have much more of a clue why I'm starting to learn aromatherapy, and why I started painting pink rose buds to heal my 'roots'. And knowing that everything is purposeful, and nothing is random can make life a real joy to live.