Lessons from Plants: Spring 2024 Edition

And ongoing garden meditations in Santa Monica

If you live in LA, plant-inspired meditations at local plant nursery are happening monthly. Next gathering is June 22 at 9am. Join us!

---

Hi friends,

Back in January, I shared some wintry lessons from my houseplants which I can sum up as:

Be relentless in your growth. Do what you need to to find space + create the conditions for growth.

This lesson still hits. Damn if it doesn’t still hit! You think a plant is gonna throw you some trendy, capricious insight? No, these are timeless wisdom vessels, more quotable than Rumi.

And yet still more lessons have emerged lately from my plant-y friends, like buds and bark beetles waking up from winter’s slumber.

“Spring” on the west side of Los Angeles is marine layer lethargy, or what I imagine it’s like inside the Bermuda Triangle (and believe you me I’ve imagined this many times). The spring in my memories growing up in the Hudson Valley is much more vibrant. It’s a great big exhale, finally.

Even despite the persistent gray, the recent months have brought milder air and a good deal of new growth among my plant-y brood. Efforts on my part have been made to propagate and re-plant (50-50 success), and in particular level-up my monstera into bigger pots (you got this, girl!) while lovingly encourage them vertically with new moss pole friends.

As I wrote in January, the plants keep track; their green little bodies keep score. They are sewn to the seasons because their lives depends on it. As the season turns, lessons emerge. Here are some spring-y ones:

1. The right type of challenge at the right time can change everything.

I have been enamored with a biological concept called hormesis ever since I learned about it a few years ago. It’s the idea that exposure to low-level stress over time can actually cause favorable adaptation. The right kind of discomfort unlocks your wild ability to grow. Think of the grain of sand that causes an oyster to produce a pearl.

Hormesis happens when we meet level-up moments. I love hormesis because if one extrapolates this scientific concept existentially — as I personally love to do — the framework holds yet it becomes much more fluid. How much low-level stress is enough for you to make a pearl? Only you’ll know!

I returned home from a visit to a dear friend in Tuscon a few years ago with three cactus paddles gifted from her vast garden. Not even welders’ gloves could protect me from those spines, so I resigned myself a cactus sacrifice — a cactifice — and planted each. Eventually, they each grew one more paddle.

A few months ago, I moved one cactus into the bathroom. Frankly, it’s because I’d just run out of surfaces for plants. I continue to propagate new plants as my son’s ability to lunge for them wherever they grows stronger; so they’re fleeing into farther more random corners of the home.

Onto the bathroom counter the cactus went, with much less natural light than it’d known. I figured it would, at least, survive.

She showed me! A fourth paddle forming.

To my surprise, the cactus thrived. Thuh-RIVED. It began growing a second paddle, which got very big very fast, and quickly after grew a third. Exponential. Hormesis!

This cactus was like, “MA’AM! Check yourself.” My assumption about what this environment would do to it was totally wrong.

Time changes all of us in all ways, so nothing ever really stays as it was. Reconsider and reclassify your “growth” and “comfort” zones regularly. Assumptions about what might happen based on what has happened are… understandable, but are really just clunky, rigid placeholders. Let them go, at least once in a while. This frees up energy and invites playfulness into our relationship with life.

The worst thing might become the best thing and vice versa. Growth can happen anywhere, anytime, if your conditions are right for it.

2. It’s always a good time to chill: lay low + just be yourself.

My orchid, and I support her 100%!

I’m partial to this lesson because as the weather starts to get nicer, there’s often more pressure to “do stuff” and “get outside” and “make the most of the day.” But really, come on, it’s perennially the right time to just lay low and chill.

This is precisely what my orchid is currently doing:

As an orchid newbie, this is the first orchid I’ve ever kept alive to see a second bloom! I pruned it when it died and then simply let it regrow how it wanted. And wow it wanted to grow was horizontally outward and downward, so it rests gently a foot out on whatever surface it’s set upon. Chill and laid low.

At first I felt silly, like I’d missed a step in my orchid cultivating efforts. It’s a tad unwieldy in this form. But I’m so glad I did not interfere. Did you know orchids, in their natural, chill, just-being-themselves states swoop down toward the earth? It’s because they naturally grow in tree canopies or pungent little tree rot holes in jungles, etcetera.

Drooping and swooping, and just being, IS the orchid essence. Magical. Orchids are native to nearly every continent, with the aptitude and playfulness to grow on sooo many surfaces (rocks, plants, trees) without parasitizing them. They are epiphytes, just like airplants. They survive, in part, through their light but meaningful relationships with other living things. The friend who is there for you, but never draining or clinging.

Most of the orchids we see in grocery stores seem to be performing their orchid-ness — with little hair clips holding them up like a scene in Weekend at Bernies. Maybe you feel just as tired, just as performed, and are longing to lay low. There’s always time to power down and chill.

For orchids, and many other plant friends, a cycle of growth requires a bold pruning. When we prune — cut back, clean out, remove what is old and no longer needed — we’re given a chance to rest back to our natural proclivities. Take a deep breath and stop performing ourselves and just be ourselves instead.

3. We live among immense beauty + constant loss (we can hold both).

Last week my airplant bloomed. Did you know airplants bloomed!? I did not. For a few years it was a regular Tillandsia grey-green airplant I’d bought at a gift shop in Joshua Tree. And then all of a sudden it was a reminder of life’s greatest transitions. The leaves turned a brilliant coral pink and fabulous purple flowers with yellow stamen burst forth. It was really a sight to behold!

Judy Bloom over here!

A bloom is bittersweet, because it’s often the signal of an ending. Airplants bloom just once in their life cycle. After they bloom, they begin the process of dying, though not before they “pup,” or give birth to new little airplants who begin their own life cycles (and eventual blooms). A fractal of beauty and death! We cannot escape it.

A bloom is a career crescendo, a Tony award-winning one-woman-show, and at once a death rattle. It’s a sacred transition, a marker in the ether that nothing stays the same.

In researching more about my blooming, birthing airplant I was struck by this advice:

“During the blooming period, the mother plant is working very hard. The formation of new baby plants, called pups, are beginning, and the mother is diverting lots of her energy into growing those new plant babies too. It's crucial to pamper your air plant a little bit extra during the blooming period.”

This sounded to me like the role of a doula during a birth (this particular one a homebirth on my kitchen table!). And indeed it was. To doula is to be in service to. To accompany, to support, to guide, and… to witness. To witness the beauty unfolding, the grueling work it required, and the great transition that would soon follow.

Part of witnessing is not just the really seeing but also the telling. The amplification of that which was witnessed. So I did just that.

This past weekend was my monthly Garden Meditation at a local Santa Monica nursery where I offer a brief plant-inspired dharma talk and then lead a somewhat idiosyncratic meditation session that blends a traditional technique — usually awareness of the breath — with the framework of an actual plant.

This time, of course, the fleeting splendor of my blooming airplant inspired the dharma seeds I shared. Airplants are magic, I said. “I thought they were just dried flowers!” one participant exclaimed.

Elegy to airplants

There are more than 650 species of Tillandsia, or airplants, living all over the world. With simply air, water, and themselves, they thrive. They drink fog, dew, mist, and rain. Their leaves function like roots, with little hairs called trichomes drawing and keeping nutrients in. They are deeply self-resourcing. Yet they are deeply relationship beings; like our chill friend the orchid they are epiphytes, relying the nutrient kindness of other living things without being parasites.

We talked about the themes of self-resourcing and of holding lightly. It is wonderful to feel your roots deep into the earth sometimes, but with earthiness and rootedness can also come a stuckness or stagnancy. Airplants remind us we can touch earth in the lightest, most loving way. Airplants remind us we already have what we need.

Bringing awareness to our internal capacity to self-resource — whether with mist and air, or memory and grit, etcetera — we imagined a glowing orb of compassion. Somehow, all living things are working as hard as they can to resource themselves as they live to survive and thrive.

At this point we began a lovingkindness or metta meditation. This technique begins first with an awareness of self, and a wish for your self: “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be free, may I live at ease.”

Next your sphere of awareness moves outward toward a friend or family member, or perhaps an airplant you love. “May they be safe, may they be happy, may they be free, may they live at ease.”

Third, the sphere of awareness extends toward someone neutral who you do not know. An airplant you haven’t met yet. “May they be safe, may they be happy, may they be free, may they live at ease.”

Fourth, you call to mind someone who has wronged or hurt you. This can be difficult, but you wish for them: “May they be safe, may they be happy, may they be free, may they live at ease.”

Finally, you call to mind all sentient beings. All plants everywhere. All humans and animals and other living things. May all beings be safe, may all beings be happy, may all beings be free, may all beings live at ease.”

We closed our meditation, our bio-diverse co-regulation with plants and animals, by dedicating the merit we cultivated toward those in greatest need. Sitting there under the mild sun of an impeccable day, far away from war in my beautiful bubble, I was and continue to think about the gutting devastation in Rafah, in Sudan, in Ukraine, and elsewhere. So much loss held with tenderness as we sat amidst so much verdant beauty. While it can feel difficult to find the space or the energy to hold so much pain and loss, somehow sitting with the beauty and breathing with plants can help.

Just a plug for something that looks amazing… Diana May, a super thoughtful and amazing yoga teacher I love to learn from, and Jessica Lee, author of Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, are holding an online Somatic Plant Workshop on Thursday June 20. The cost is $20 (suggested) and will support support Seeding Sovereignty. “Participants will be asked to contemplate a plant that is important to them in some way shape or form.” You should definitely check it out!