I wrote this nine years ago, but it stuck with me and inspired the "tea Buddhism" that is mentioned in my recent (2016) science fiction novel, If Wishes Were Spaceships. The inner life of plants is explored more in the sequel which I'm currently working on.
Dec 11, 2007
Every year I sit by the window, drinking hot tea and communing with this flower in the soft morning light. You may think "communing" is an odd choice of words, but after you've sat and thought, perhaps you, too, will understand and commune with a bloom as I have.
This plant is a Paphiopedilum orchid, variety "Hsinying Jewel". I thought I liked the vini-colored paphs better until I got this green flower and found its face every bit as appealing as the more richly-colored ones. It doesn't really need flashy coloration because the form is so striking. If, as in pulp sci fi novels, aliens were actually plants, this is how I'd envision them. There is something almost intelligent, something almost recognizable in their look. Of course that could be because legend has it that paphs were the inspiration for the original movie representation of triffids.
It's the look of the bloom---the way it seems to be looking back at you---that invites one to make comparisons between our lives and its. There's something serene about sitting next to this plant drinking tea, maybe having a Christmas cookie. It's on the windowseat, so we're at eye-level, in a manner of speaking.
It is still. I am not. I've got a day ahead of me with "a lot on my plate" (besides Christmas cookies!). Where does it have to go? What does it have to do? Who makes demands on it? What does it want for the day---or its lifetime? It has nowhere to go. If it were an outdoor wild plant, it would be permanently rooted in the ground. It cannot dash around and do things. However, its lack of mobility isn't a handicap. If I did not move I would not be able to eat and drink. I could not live. If I did not move I'd get nothing accomplished. Nothing done, for good or ill. Pascal wrote that the source of all evil is man's inability to sit still in a room. Here is the Paph, sitting still in the dining room, while I eat, drink and make plans. My mind is rarely still even when my body is.
Prayer and meditation bring on a stillness of mind as well as body. Perhaps the Paph exists in a state of pure communion with the divine in a way I can never achieve even at my most quiet, most spiritually complete and enriched moments, simply because I am a human.
Everything is provided for plants: food from the soil, rain, sunlight. The biological nature of plants, their very structure is such that they take up liquid and nutrients and absorb sunlight, which on a cellular level is turned into energy, without any conscious effort. There is no place they have to go, nothing they have to do, no demanding jobs, no social obligations. All they have to do is just be.
For this reason, in the winter when my paphs bloom, I find myself thinking that they are closer to God than us humans are, that they are simply, quietly, and essentially in touch with the divine, with all their being, at every moment. For this reason I not only admire, but envy, them as I sit here quietly and reach out with my heart and mind to touch the divine in them.
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