The rose symbolizes a plethora of things; love, romance, sensuality, mysticism and more importantly protection. The bright hue of the flowers usually encompass your mind, but if you look a little deeper you’ll see it for its entirety. Thorns bud from the stem like natural barbed wire. Barbed wire is usually seen as something antagonistic; with ties to war, ostracism and containment. These are all valid takes but I see barbed wire as something else concurrently. Wires show protection; keeping the bad out while keeping the good in. If you got barbed wire in the hood there’s a pretty strong chance you got something worth protecting. There’s also the fact the they have an almost hypnotic beauty about them. The concentric circles are almost magnetic but if you get too close you’re bound to hurt yourself. The gravitational appeal of a garden of roses may draw you in the same way, but if you get to carless you could cut yourself on the thorns. The very same way that if you try to scale some barbed wire you’d probably get hurt. I guess I typed all this to say the inspiration for everything can be found in nature. You just gotta open your eyes and see the world for what it is. Understanding the world comes with knowing you’ll never fully grasp it. I feel like the whole point of wanting to understand boils down to accepting you’ll never know everything; that alone makes me excited to learn and digest even more. The more I see the more parallels I can draw and who knows what happens when those brain synapses connect in my head. I feel like it wasn’t that hard to connect barbed wire and roses, but I’m not sure who else would’ve organically drawn the same conclusion. Everyone digests information differently; but I feel like the more we try to understand each other the closer we can get to stability as a society. See the metal on my thorns before you try to grab me.