Wednesday Wisdom #3 - MORNING GLORIES

A friend of mine showed up last summer with two seed packets - morning glories and night-blooming moonflower. I treasured them all winter, as my daughter arrived pre-mature and I relocated to be close to her in the hospital. In the end, she was hospitalized for four months, almost to the day. Even though we returned home in late January, by early May I still hadn’t sprouted the seeds, too much travel back and forth for her doctor’s appointments.

I knew I was late, but my friend was returning for another visit soon, so I decided to sprout them anyway. In the photo I posted in the last newsletter, you can see them on the right side of the tray:

When I wrote in the last edition about preparing a small section of soil for the amaranth, I also prepared a place for the morning glories and moonflower. The morning glories took off, climbing the fence, and eventually clumping on the lights hanging above.

You can imagine my shock the day I realized that the flowers only last for one day! Then they fall and you have to wait for a new one to bloom. Each morning one of my first acts is to take baby Hazel out onto the patio to see which flowers have bloomed that day. 

All flowers are delicate. They are only in season for a brief period of time. They have very specific needs regarding soil type, sunshine, and hydration. Whoever said “bloom where you are planted” doesn’t know shit about flowers. Flowers don’t bloom where they are planted. They bloom under very specific conditions.

We are all carrying around seeds, in one form or another, waiting for the right conditions to plant them. The truth is, there is rarely a perfect time. And yet, the conditions do matter. It’s in that tension that we birth our imperfect creations into the world.

In their short life, morning glories are an extreme. Each bloom lasts only a day, and are so delicate they can easily be damaged by rain or wind. And yet, everywhere I went this summer, I was struck by the omnipresence of them, on fences by the yoga studio in Columbus, or growing in tangled patches on the ground.

I feel a kind of kinship with the morning glories. I have a lot of ideas, and they come and go. Many of them don’t last very long, but they give me a lot of pleasure when I am working on them, and I feel insulated in a way from capitalist definitions of success and cultural prescriptions for how life “should” be lived. I have other friends that are more like the Amaranth, growing one or a few strong solid blooms, lasting for weeks, glorious to behold.

One of the reasons that I love giving close attention to flowers is their diversity. Some want to be planted the fall before the growing season. Some don’t want to be planted until the soil has warmed, in late Spring. Some want sandy soil, others clay, still others will grow anywhere. There are groups of flowers that have similar needs, and some flowers that are completely unique in their needs.

It’s taken me a few decades to realize that people too have varying and specific needs. Our purpose in this life is to acknowledge what our own true needs are, and to arrange our lives to give ourselves what we need, even if it costs other people something. You can’t expect a plant that prefers shade to grow in full sun, and you can’t expect yourself to open into full expression in the wrong place, with a community that doesn’t light you up, or with a partner or a job who is not aligned.

Take pleasure in the seeds that you carry with you, regardless of whether you can plant them now or not. And start making moves for your full expression, however long it takes.