From Hart to Hearts
A Message from Rev Linda Hart for the month of May 2010
For over three years now, it has sat on a small shelf by the back door. The plant perplexed me. I had grown philodendron before, and knew them to be hearty plants with a proclivity for climbing. But this one refused to do that. In fact, it didn’t do anything that I expected.
We had saved it. When we moved into the manse, it was in a pot out in the back garden. Rootbound, it was not very healthy, and needed a good bit of care. We found another pot and transplanted it.
I’m a forgetful house plant tender, but am lucky that Peter remembers to water and coddle plants. He kept it well hydrated and fertilised it with coffee grounds. Still it didn’t thrive as I anticipated it would. Leaves would grow and then turn yellow and die. Nonetheless, it kept on going, sending up shoots with broad leaves, one after the other after the other. But it simply never took off quite the way I expected. I thought about using it as an example of that which endures in a sermon. And then about two months ago, it did something surprising.
It bloomed. And still I didn’t see it.
Honestly, I’d given up on it long before. It was such an odd plant, that I stopped even noticing much about it, even though I walked nearby it dozens of times each day. But the blossom caught my eye. At first I thought it was a strange new kind of frond thrown up among all the other broad leaves. Maybe it was finally going to do what it was meant to do, grow as it was meant to grow! On closer inspection, I discovered that it was the bloom of the plant. That is, we had a stunted and somewhat pathetic, but utterly alive calla lily blooming in our kitchen.
Around our house back in the US, we have perhaps 30 or 40 plants nestled in under the eaves. Persistent and vigorous, the callas have survived dry summers and snowy winters with no help from us. I know calla lilies. I have dug up their tuberous roots and tried to thin them out, but they come back, green and shiny broad leaves.
And yet I walked by this one for nearly three years without seeing what it was. I left it sad and captured in an alien territory, not living where it was meant to be.
This summer, it will be replanted out in the front garden in just the right space. It will, no doubt, take root, take hold and not let go as is its custom. I will know now what to look for and when to watch for the graceful stem and elegant rolled flower to emerge.
What strange blindness comes to us sometimes in our lives! What is nearby you that you haven’t seen? What have you missed because you’ve not looked openly at what is right around you? What treasures have you missed because you didn’t know they were there?
I plan to open my eyes a bit more, and attend more to what is right there in front of me: a day, a random ray of sunlight, a quiet morning, the kiss of a loved one, the beauty of flowers that grow in spite of my neglect.
Linda