Diva or monk?
There are houseplants, and then there is the night-blooming cereus lily, which blooms only once a year for a single night. If you’re out of town or distracted or fall asleep too early, you miss it. You can’t prolong, preserve, or cajole the blossom to stick around. By morning, it’s gone.
Historically, people threw parties for this plant (a cactus, technically), called Bloom Parties, scheduling elegant fetes, with food and music, around the fickleness of a single flower. To date, the celebrations in our house have been limited to an initial shriek upon spotting a bud, watching it with the same vigilance as our sleeping newborn in those first weeks after bringing her home from the hospital, and badgering anyone nearby (OK, my husband) to look at the flower. Have you seen the flower? Can you smell the flower? Isn’t it amazing? But have you looked at it recently? Come here; you have to see.
Objectively speaking, a party with food and music is more fun. Alas, we don’t go to parties anymore due to the coronavirus pandemic. My connection to the flower feels different because the world is dramatically different. We are living in an unnatural time, which alters even natural wonders.
Yes, a flower that commands care and attention 364¾ days a year and blossoms (if you’re lucky) for a quarter of a day is high maintenance. A diva of houseplants.
Or is it a monk?
My mother gave me an offshoot of her night-blooming cereus of the Selenicereus grandiflorus variety as a housewarming gift several years ago. For five years, the lily merely observed. I wrote a book. I ran a marathon. Remember the winter of unceasing snow? That happened. I got married. We had a daughter. The plant, as houseplants are wont to do, just impartially sat there. Each time it outgrew its pot, I gave it a bigger one.
We bought our first home and moved in just before Christmas. By summer, six years after my mom first set the small clay pot on my half-unpacked countertop, the cereus finally bloomed. The monk became the diva, and she put on the show of her life.
A white, graceful blossom the size of my hand, it emits the most intoxicating scent. Not heady or severe, like too much perfume, but light like a breeze. Shut-it-down romantic. You don’t have to be a flower person, or a nature person, or even a person who notices when someone gets a haircut, but you will notice something transcendent about this flower.
Natural wonders usually occur outdoors: shooting stars, epic lightning, or breathtaking sunsets over beaches or mountain ranges. The feeling of happening upon deer in a clearing. I once saw dozens of mobula rays fling themselves out of the ocean and soar through the sky all at once. I was the only person on the beach. Meditating, as it happens. Thank God I had the good sense to open my eyes. I was also in Mexico, and it’s safe to say I won’t travel there again anytime soon.
In Massachusetts, we have been living in quarantine for more than 100 days. The lily will bloom this week. We won’t miss it, because we rarely leave.
The difference this year is not that I’m more grateful for the natural beauty I will encounter without leaving home, which while true, feels pat. Or how it will connect me to my mom, who will reliably freak out at the photos I text her. That’s not new either; I inherited my horticultural enthusiasm from her.
I will pause to appreciate the present moment within our interior world and acknowledge what it means to be sheltered in a new and urgent way from a grave and present danger outside. This change is stark. I am more aware of how much luck is involved in having a safe and comfortable place to live (let alone one containing flowers) — how unfair. I think about Zen teachings of impermanence. I remember the old adage to “bloom where we are planted.”
What’s altered, what I keep thinking about most, are all the unremarkable nights and years of not-blooming. Thriving, in nature and life, is cyclical. This is not a revelation. And yet, what seems revealed is the marvel that precedes magnificence: the gentler, essential work of surviving. It may not look like much, but it’s everything.