It’s been exactly a year since I returned to the US from Palestine. In this time, I’ve gotten to observe an orchid that lives in a sunny nook in our kitchen. It’s a few years old, and has gone through many bloom cycles. Punctuated by periods of pause, the orchid is sometimes a dormant stick, sometimes teeming with fresh buds, sometimes a constellation of glorious blooms. Then comes the wilt, the drop, and the return to emptiness. No end, no beginning. All ends, all beginnings.
Each loop around the spiral is just as exhilarating as the last. Bearing witness to nature’s cycles is like reading scripture. It gives me language beyond words to make sense of my own experience passing through life’s many portals.
I spent last weekend in DC, a city that was home for 8 years before Palestine. Returning to a place where you once lived is a potent way to tap into the impermanence of self. At times, I could clearly visualize my past self, the heartache and worries I carried throughout these streets. I don’t experience the world in quite that way anymore; I have moved through many small deaths, albeit unconsciously, to arrive at the me of today with different types of heartaches and worries. Having this realization from higher ground felt somewhat celebratory. Still, I felt a pang for my younger self, how I wish I could deliver the self-love to her that I’ve only come to know as I’ve grown older.
I’m reminded of Amir Sulaiman’s poem called “a gardener is not a florist” from his collection Love, Gnosis & Other Suicide Attempts. (I’m unable to find this poem on the internet, so reach out if you’d like to know the full piece). Among perfectly crafted stanzas, Sulaiman repeats:
a gardener is not a florist
like a lover is not a killer.
This poem speaks so deeply to me about the variety of death we can enact. There is the death that begets death: the florist. Or the death that begets life: the gardener. In life, I want to have the courage to tend to myself and my relationships with the ease of a gardener flitting about a shrub with shears. To prune away wilted and excess leaves with an underlying trust that these acts enable life to express itself more abundantly.
Speaking my truth is a way I show up as a gardener in life. So much suffering comes from denying ourselves the right to be heard. By giving language to our wounds, even ones that have scabbed over, we offer ourselves a balm that shepherds in the creation of scars: the end of death so that life can begin again. I had a chance to speak my truth this weekend in a way my past self so deeply needed. The very act lifted weight off my heart and mind, extending healing to my past and future self, making way for new branches of possibility.
Little acts of healing cause tiny spirals of change that radiate beyond ourselves in mysterious ways. Paul Krafel, a naturalist with the National Park Service put it best in his book Seeing Nature:
Did the insects make the flowers possible or did the flowers make the insects possible? They probably made each other possible…The cause lies in their spiraling relationship…I understand that large effects can be produced by a very small spiral looping over and over again. As I open my mind to the significance of smaller changes, I find more and more spirals… The world is full of spirals containing unknown power.
Life becomes more easeful when we remember we too are nature. I held and snuggled my friends’ 7-month-old baby River this weekend. His tiny fist wrapped around my finger flashed me back to an orchid bud, a dense vessel pulsating with life force energy on its way to expand into a glorious blossoming. Observing a baby observe the world is a teacher in and of itself, an embodiment of perfect curiosity. Catching his laugh, bearing two tiny bottom teeth, is like seeing God. Humans at the beginning of their first bloom cycle model an ease and wonder we can bring to all our incarnations.
I can see so clearly now that the past year of my life was the end of a bloom cycle for me, a time of death. I left Palestine, returned home, and entered a stage of wilt. I resisted loosening from my stem, resisted dropping into the abyss, afraid of what it means to be empty. Then I remember that the very same life force energy that vibrates through an orchid also moves through me. That all creatures need rest and dormancy to begin again, that nature is hardwired to surrender to a trust that buds will emerge again.
I am starting to think that the richest parts of being human may not even be the blossoming itself, but in the inevitable return, the bend of the spiral that folds back in on itself, weaving through time and space. I notice it as a writer too: the joy of knowing that creativity is an infinitely regenerative force far exceeds the pleasure of producing a singular piece. The more we give into the infinity of cyclical life, the more we are propelled to plunge into deeper consciousness. The more we allow ourselves to die, the more we are re-born. The more we coil, the deeper we love.
Absolutely beautiful! Thank you Anam for sharing this introspective wisdom, and Gillian for sharing this with me 👏🏼
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