Important plant metaphors

Here are some plant metaphors and gratuitous storytelling that I hope you enjoy.

I.

I started my herb and vegetable garden by sprouting seeds in an egg carton. I poured little pockets of soil into each divot and haphazardly scattered seeds about. Seasoned gardeners actually use tweezers to sow one seed per egg cup, but as someone who had watched three Youtube videos on balcony gardening, I could not be bothered with such minutiae. It might get a little crowded, but they’ll figure it out, I thought. That’s what happens in nature. You get planted with all your sibling seeds and then you duke it out. You get eaten by a creature and shat out and now you have to grow in poop.

I was thrilled when little green shoots started popping up and my head started racing with balcony garden fantasies. I wanted the air to be filled with the stone smell of tomato leaves.

One morning I forgot to water my seedlings and in the afternoon, I found them already wilting. (Hence the importance of consistency!) I immediately rushed to water them and they perked up again, but I wasn’t convinced that they were actually alive. They seemed more like zombie plants that stood up again just because of osmosis.

Their leaves turned this sickly green-yellow color but didn’t drop. They sprouted some new baby leaves that didn’t keep growing. They just stood in this arrested development for weeks, unable to overcome the trauma of their first drought, as their comrades (even the crowded ones) greedily grew.

This was not part of the fantasy. How was I to make jars and jars of pesto at the end of summer? I was just a woman with soggy egg cartons on her balcony who had watched three Youtube videos.

Then I thought (rather late) to replant everybody and give everyone their own pot. This is working. Everyone is much happier. Most importantly, the zombie plants that were stuck in arrested development are growing again. Everyone needs a little more love and a lot more space.

II.

Orchids need drought to rebloom. A thirsty plant thinks that it’s about to die and will grow flowers as a last attempt to reproduce. I know this to be true because I will always entrust a friend to water my plants and check my mail when I travel, and he will always remember to do the latter but not the former, so that whenever I come back, I’m always scurrying about rehydrating soil but will pause at the sight of a new orchid stem. A beauty.

Too many of us grow like orchids.

From an early age, we’re given one test of survival after the next, and each time, we pass because we have to. We always do the thing, that was never the question. We’ll always bloom, but it doesn’t always come from a good place.

As adults, we are often rewarded for the survival strategies we developed as children. Concern with what your caregivers thought about you made you evolve into a well-liked, mild-mannered, stylish, and charismatic person whom others would describe as “generous” and “attentive”. A lack of control over your surroundings made you double down on the things that you can control: your time, your body, and your possessions, so you developed a religion around calendaring, working out and eating fastidiously, and organizing and cleaning your home. The fear that you were stuck and had only one way out made you obsessively master your thing (or everything), and now you work really hard, are good at a lot of things, and know a lot of stuff.

On the surface, these are all qualities that a “high-functioning, contributing member of society” displays. We end up developing qualities that our society praises, but we overlook the darkness from where they come. And on a personal level, we can’t seem to turn off our obsessions. We are constantly seeking others’ approval, optimizing and over-optimize our livelihoods, and never feel like we have done enough. We are constantly chasing a sense of safety that will never come as long as we chase it.

We live in cultures that demand everything of us, while forbidding us from being soft, tender, and sick.

But what we are is soft, tender, and sick.

There is a certain type of necessary healing that takes place if you stay in this space. There is a safety that will come to you if you stop chasing it. You do not always have to be blooming.

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