Birds, Words, & Inspiration

Small Labors Reborn

A few days ago, I heard my boyfriend comment, "Well, that's a surprise!"

Then he called to me to go out on the porch and to then look to my right.

Fully-formed and brightly bloomed, as if it had grown furiously and unfurled slyly in the hours before dawn was a single resurrection lily. I squealed and ran to get my camera.

Three years ago while I was out hiking, I stumbled on a patch of resurrection lilies in the chaparral. Naked of leaves, the bright clusters of flowers on long arching necks stretched toward the sun from within the sage. Springing from dry hard soil, they bloomed like an Easter lily smack in the middle of August. I had never seen anything so gorgeously impossible.

There were no houses nearby and certainly no gardens. I couldn't imagine someone tossing them amongst the mesquite and rabbit brush. All the same, I knew they didn't belong.

I did a bit of research and found belong in China, Japan, or Korea. They are feral flowers in many places that are far more lush in the United States. They are often called naked ladies. Yet, they don't belong in California at the entrance to the desert. I was enthralled.

How did they get there? And how intriguing that the lily goes dormant and leafless in May only to resurrect as a magnificent bloom from bare earth when all else seems to have been crushed by the summer.

So I returned to dig up some of the bulbs which I carefully planted in my yard. I wasn't sure they would take, but I tended them until I thought they might have set roots and then I left them alone and waited. I waited for a bright spark of pink to explode unexpectedly in my mostly barren front yard. I've been waiting three years for them to bloom.

And there it was, the first resurrection lily.

Seeing this first lily made me think of all the other hopeful work that I do. I write essays and novels, then I cast them to the wind. Sometimes I get stuck on the hope of what they might become, but mostly I realize my job is to work on something else and wait. I planted the bulb, I tended it in its infancy and the rest isn't up to me.

The takeaway for me is that sometimes the bulb does bloom. It isn't for me to say what takes hold and explodes from the earth demanding to be seen.

And I'm telling myself that today, the release day of We Were Wilder.

My job now is to pluck next great possibility from an expected place, tend it until it looks like it might come into its own, then do it again.

I guess you don't know, do you do? You don't know when a bit of hopeful and haphazard gardening might bloom into something beautiful. Just do the work and let the sun and the rain and earth do the rest.

xxR