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Faux Plants

This past Christmas, I had received a gift of small decorative plants set in tiny pots and something made to look like a branch of a tree. Seeing that the person who gave it to me was a teenager, I assumed the plants were plastic and just set them around the house where it made sense. In the high heat of summer, I noticed some of these succulents had dried up and died. This was the first time it had registered to me that they were infact alive the whole time and no one thought to check if they really plastic or not. If the same gift came from someone older, I would have likely paid more attention or asked but coming from a child, I just did not. I am now working hard to save the plants that have proven to be alive. Making faux plants look so natural that people will mistake them to be real is a big business, 

Thanks to how well fake plants are made, these real ones had to suffer and die. The incident made me think of how artificial things in life take over and kill what is real. Be it the the friendships and relationships of convenience or all the material things we festoon our existence with to obscure the real person. No one gets to really see or know them. Comes a point they are not able to recognize their own reality either. Recently, I heard this interview on NPR about meditation and how it was inherently hard. The hardness comes from having to see the bares bones person minus all the extras we and the world tack on to ourselves. These sad plants presumed fake until they proved to be alive by starting to die made me think of how much harder it will get to prove something is real in years to come. 

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