Skip to main content

Thinking Plants

I love houseplants but have very few of them given how the work involved in keeping them all alive grows exponentially with how much life and beauty they bring into the space. There is certain divine fairness to that equation but one that does not serve me well specially when I am away for several weeks a at time. My friend M gifted me an orchid plant several months ago and I had managed to keep just about all the flowers alive for the whole time feeding it ice-cubes weekly. When I returned from vacation there was not a single flower left though the leaves remained healthy and green. The idea of plant straws is great and logically it might even work. I need to experiment with a home-made version of the thing to see it deliver in practice. A bit of thin PVC tubing should in theory serve the same purpose as the brass straw. 

Thinking of houseplants and my somewhat theoretical love of them always brings T to mind. I worked with her some years ago. She lived in a condo in Chicago at the time and when you walked through the front door it was as if you had stepped into a tropical rain-forest. The place was teeming with houseplants of all shapes and sizes. T traveled a fair bit and had elaborate mechanisms to keep her plants thriving while she was out. Some of those plants were over a decade old - they were acquired when T first moved to America from Spain. Keeping them alive and well had symbolic importance to her. That was a love of plants manifested in a tangible way. T was that kind of person - she did not just imagine the life she would like or love, she took steps to make it happen. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more