Still Giving

on the relentless cycle of our own potential to grow

Someone gave me an amaryllis bulb for Christmas, the kind sealed in red wax. It read Apple Blossom, on the tag. The aggressive holiday red of the wax was a bit much, in the way it always is for me, but the promise was that I wouldn’t have to do a thing, just set it somewhere with light and wait. For someone without a green thumb, this kind of bulb would be a blessing. I’ve had a green thumb in the past, but lately it’s enough to remember to water and care and seek light for myself. I have received other forced bulbs this year that required more effort, and they were a failure. Even my air plants have been a challenge this past year.

Anyhow, I set the crimson waxy sphere in the kitchen windowsill without ceremony and without expectation, and I mostly forgot about it.

I have forced spring bulbs before, coaxed them through cold and dark with careful tending, and I have lost more than I’ve kept. There is a particular kind of defeat in that, in doing everything right and watching something fail to thrive. I know that defeat. This past year has been a thorough education in it. Relentless is the word I keep reaching for, the way certain kinds of hard don’t pause to let you catch your breath, the way your own body can become a place you don’t entirely trust.

So I want you to understand what it meant that I didn’t have to do anything for this plant, that I all but forgot about it, and that it bloomed into a glorious double flower anyway. Here is the part that still feels like a quiet astonishment to me: when the first two flowers faded, it bloomed again. Seven times, so far. SEVEN. One flower fading before another appeared. The first stalks were tall and robust with brilliant flowers, but the later ones were each smaller and softer, as though the bulb were learning something about conservation. Still, they keep coming, through the short days and the long nights, through my hardest hours and the small accumulating easier moments, through the mornings I did not even want to get up. In a corner of the room, this small creature in its red wax was simply continuing to live its purpose.

There is something I have been taught, something I believe, and something I still struggle at times to feel: that life wants to continue. That the impulse toward blossoming is not earned, but innate. I understand this in an intellectual way, the way you understand things that have not quite reached your bones yet. The amaryllis did not know it had been given to someone going through their hardest season. It did not know anything at all. It simply held, sealed inside it, the genetic instructions to open.

I think about resilience differently now than I used to. I once thought it meant not breaking, but now I think it might simply mean continuing, and not in any dramatic way, and certainly not without cost. The seventh bloom is not like the first. It is smaller, paler, quieter, and I love it even more for that. There is something honest in it, as if it’s saying, this is what I have left, and it’s worth my effort.

That feels true to me right now in a way I could not have understood before this past year. I did not tend this plant, and I did not earn these flowers. They came anyway, in their diminishing and faithful succession, and I received them the way you receive grace when you are too worn down to refuse it, quietly, with something loosening in your chest that you had not realised was held so tight.

The bulb is still in my kitchen window, right now, holding the smallest blossom yet. I do not know if it will bloom again. In the corner of a room, while I was busy being relentless about mustering as much resilience as I could, this little plant was simply opening. It offered its loveliness again and again without needing me to witness it and without needing anything from me at all. I think this is what hope looks like when it is being honest. It is not the grand return of spring, literal or metaphorical, or the full, triumphant first bloom, but the quieter thing, the smaller, still-true thing that continues to arrive, again and again in the growing light.

my friends… the eighth blossom has appeared. Can you believe it! EIGHT!

Post note:

We spent a lovely Easter Sunday with our local children and grandchildren, always missing those who are far away. I have had several good days in a row, which in itself feels like a miracle. Gratitude is too small a word for how I feel about many things. And yet, the anger I feel toward the ruling government of my country is growing by the minute. I am so ashamed at how my country is acting in the world and I cannot believe no one in my government has the intelligence or courage or integrity to put an end to this madness. All can I say is that we must work harder than ever to use our own morality, to strengthen our resolve to remember our own imperfect morality, to love our neighbours (all of them) and to show the most kindness we have ever shown as we go about our daily lives. People are suffering at the hands of our elected federal politicians. The world over. We must demand better. We must not forget our morality. Do what you can right around you, raise your voices against the lies, crimes and immoral actions being committed, and VOTE every single time you have a chance to vote.