I have an orchid that blooms diligently year after year; it was a house warming gift from a friend. The first year it bloomed from scratch in my new house, I shared its beauty with my family over video calls and messages. I had planted several interesting indoor plants in this new home so the orchid was one of many but what differentiated it was that, unlike others, it flowered. Then later that year my brother, who was a part of this message thread, passed away unexpectedly.
Since then every time this orchid blooms, I think of him with an achy heart. Not because he had any attachment to orchids but because the first time it flowered in my new home, we shared the joy. There is also a sweetness to this experience since the flowers appear only once a year over the summer. The unique shape of the flower along with annual blossoms may make you think that it’s a fickle plant but that’s not the case. It’s my easiest to care for plant with a flowering cycle that I can count on. And so I await this orchid’s flowers with a bittersweet feeling. Sweetness that my wait gets showered with the gift of a flower and the bitterness of marking time’s travel from my moment of loss.
This year, just as three buds started to appear, I adopted a cat named Fern. In her inquisitiveness, Fern sniffed and bit off one bud and the other two got dislodged while moving the orchid to a less accessible spot. In one fell swoop, I lost one of my key markers on this very private journey of loss. Before this episode I hadn’t acknowledged the role this flower was serving for me and now that I’ve lost it, I have been thinking about how its annual rhythm helped me navigate personal time and loss. The orchid didn’t create or remove the sadness of loss. It was more like an etch-a-sketch clock, self-created and impermanent. If it wasn’t an orchid, I would have likely anointed something else with this meaning. It seems to me that these personal markers infuse private meaning to time. While our focus is on time and not the markers themselves, if we didn’t have the markers…would we understand time’s passage the same way? If we didn’t have a sense for what a minute, hour, or year means in very personal terms, would we be able to infuse our compressed lives with so much joy and meaning? These markers give our aches, joys, and loves a time-bound container. They are like a metronome, keeping the beat of our lives, reminding us to live in alignment with our innermost nudges.
Even though my orchid’s fate next year lies in Fern’s self-control abilities, I think for now it will continue to serve as my private marker of love and loss.
“We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads…
You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us
There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people
We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are
But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.”― Alberto Ríos
