Flowering Fridays: On Patience

Patience is also a form of action — Auguste Rodin

Admittedly, this is not the best picture. (I love my Canon Powershot, but it does have its limits!)

Nonetheless, for me, it's an important picture.

Last year for Christmas my mom sent me a Phalaenopsis orchid through the mail. Admittedly, that in itself is an optimistic act for a tropic flower to last (even with express delivery) through the brittle Wisconsin weather. And indeed when the beautiful orchid arrived it was frostbit, its many blooms were withered and its leaves were pocked with marks. 

It broke my heart to see this plant, which had to endure this suffering just because it was sent to my house.This was the second plant that the floral company had sent. (The first one fared even worse.) And again the representative at the floral company told me to throw it out, but I couldn't bear to do so.

So, I removed the dead stalks as they finally withered up, then tended to this plant as I do my other six orchids — by watering it, talking to it and placing it above the sink on a sunny southern-facing windowsill.

At times it has felt like a futile undertaking. Nothing has been happening for months, but there were some leaves that still looked green. And so I waited. And hoped. And practiced patience, a trait that I'm committed to cultivating more deeply.

And lo and behold, after Christmas, I noticed the first signs of the new stalks and the buds forming. Soon there will be blooms.

Thank you, dear orchid, for the teaching me about being patient and how to be patient takes action.

To keep watering and keep trusting the blooms were coming even when they weren't yet results to show for it is patience in action.

It's a lesson I need to remember in life and in the projects I intend to "seed" this year. 

Tell me, what areas of your life are you watering and trusting that it will someday bloom?

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.