Plants and You

Garden, what garden? I grew up with plastic plants around the house and beautiful flowers made of a colorful and shiny material, certainly you can't call that a garden. There was a pubic garden across the street where I was lucky to have a park but not inside our house, somehow the plants my mom had would never survive. Our garden was actually a piece of cemented backyard with pots of plants here and there.

My mom had the belief that the ability to grow plants was somehow a synonym of the ability to amass wealth; she observed that she usually saw wealthy people surrounded with amazing gardens with a collection of peculiar species. In fact, her wealthy friends were usually surrounded by beautiful, real plants everywhere inside the house and in their garden. I remember seeing orchids on the tables and very tall bamboo shoots with the glossiest green leaves I almost thought they were plastic plants.

This belief wandered in my mind for decades, and started making my own speculations about this relationship between the Midas touch and the green fingers. Maybe it had to do that because a person with ability with plants a.k.a green fingers by turning plants and gardens greener might be able to turn other things into green papers a.k.a dollars? And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in time one of Merlin's many disciple's descendant tried converting tree leaves into money but didn't succeed so that's why we have the saying: "Money doesn't grow on trees". For years I kept on making up my own theories to either confirm or bust this myth until my adulthood.

Eventually, I moved out and had a place I could call my own, suddenly I was interested in plants and as Feng Shui beginner I would simply follow the advice on books and place the right plant in the direction indicated. According to Feng Shui plants would help to give life, would symbolize wood element and it would bring in energy and life to your space. Energy and life was particularly rang a bell for me since I live alone and usually not home, it was my try to give my apartment the ambiance of a real home, a sense that it was habitable and a sense that something was alive. Buy my plants would die, whether they were bamboo shoots, or just green leaves or bushes or vines or pots of flowers they would all end up brown and lifeless. It didn't matter if I would water them more or less, let them have sunlight or not, nothing seemed to make a difference. The phantom of the ability to incite the growth green leaves would come back to haunt me: "You won't be wealthy because you can't even grow a plant", I logically concluded. I felt cursed with the touch of deadly wintry touch; it felt like I had to keep my hands away from the whole plant kingdom because whatever I grew would die. Definitely if there was something called the Midas touch and if it was related to plants, I didn't have it.

Funny enough I was in a time of great financial restriction, whatever I would receive from my paycheck would literally evaporate from my hands mysteriously. Several areas in my life were also as grey and grim as believing that whatever I touched would shrivel up and die. I experimented darkest of all nights physically, emotionally and mentally, this plunged me to go to therapy for I yearned to understand why I was all alone, why nothing in my life was alive, but most of all I wanted to feel alive and that life was mine, because someone I felt like a zombie just living on an automatic pilot.

My apartment eventually reflected what was in my inner cement garden: the absence of life, joy and harmony. Actually, I was drained of life, joy and harmony long ago from a relationship which eroded my beliefs and hope, which shook my values and questioned my own reason for being.

Not one plant survived inside my house but in my office there has always been a big potted plant, it is a bountiful, wide-leaf evergreen plant which has been with me for many years. I had it removed because my office was just getting too crowded and because I was aware that my sole presence was a menace. One day the cleaning lady came in and reprimanded me, "Why did you move your plant? She was so cozy in here by your side, have a look at her out there, she's depressed!" I went and took a look at my formerly bountiful and green plant and saw "her" . . . depressed, droopy and yellowish so I decided to squeeze her back to the little corner by my chair just beside the window. I figured out that even if we were too close together it must be better than leaving her alone in that other corner and that maybe she liked my company.

When I moved to another office because of a promotion, my green friend made the move with me. One day almost as if by surprise I opened the door of my office and was seeing a meter and a half tall plant with leaves bigger than normal size paper. I had to cut the tallest stalls and transplant them somewhere. Right now, I have a piece of this plant in my house growing beautifully and I have given some stalks away to loving hands. Somehow having my office plant grow so big and healthy made me feel as if life and light was coming back into my life. It had so many connotations: I could relate it to my progress at work; my growth as a person; the fact that I took the responsibility of my own happiness; the courage of writing again after 15 years of self-destructive criticism; the fact that I was no longer calling myself fat and ugly but instead giving myself sincere compliments; the fact that I felt part of creation, that I felt alive.

I would have to partly agree that the ability to grow plants somehow has some kind of relationship with amassing wealth. However the meaning of wealth goes beyond a financial status, I relate it to an overall wealth in the different areas of your life such as blossoming health, inner emotional balance, flourishing creativity, bountiful joy of living, friendship, overflowing love and kindness towards yourself and others. And to all of this "wealth" which is imperceptible to the human naked eye, it is pure energy that I believe our green friends can literally pick-up and transform it into their beautiful, bountiful, blooming language.