I’ve grown orchids for a long time. I fell in love with them
when I went to Hawaii when I was 19, and at some point I tried to start growing
them and I found out it’s not hard at all. They’re just like any other plant,
only they have their own likes and dislikes. But I did a little research, a
very little, and this was back in the days when the internet wasn’t so easy to
use and there wasn’t so much available information as there is now. Mostly I
just went to look in stores and florist shops to see how they were growing
them, and I followed along.
There is a great store I used to go to in Chinatown all the
time when I lived in downtown Manhattan. I was only a few blocks away, and I’d
take a stroll over there to buy fish and produce and stop at the orchid store
on the way. They had other plants, too, but the orchids were the highlight, and
sometimes I’d find one that wasn’t expensive and I’d treat myself. At one point
I had so many different varieties, and I was living in this house that had an enclosed
outdoor space – I don’t know how to describe it, but it was almost like a
greenhouse except different. That was heaven for me – I was able to put all my
plants out there in the spring and summer and everything bloomed and grew in
healthy green bliss. But then I went through a really rough time and I had to
leave there and I moved several times over the next few years, and my plants
didn’t fare too well. I lost almost everything except for a very few old
standbys that stuck with me through it all.And then I moved into the apartment I have now, and I have more plants than ever again. Last year when I bought that orchid on sale, I just happened to run into two more sales at Whole Foods over the next few months and I was able to buy two more. One Dendrobium and the other another little Phaleonopsis, yellow, with fuschia spots all over it. And a friend who had some given to her as a donation for her food pantry gave me two more, I don’t remember at all what their name is and when I just looked it up, I think they’re Cattleyas. They look like little birds flying, one is white and pink and the other is a darker pink I think, though it hasn’t bloomed in a while so I don’t remember. The Dendrobium I don’t remember the color of either – maybe white or maybe it’s peachy or yellow? They mostly only bloom once a year and I’m waiting to see it again.
I remember years ago someone asked me if I had any pets, and
I said I didn’t have any because I have plants. For some reason they heard me
say that I had plans, and I’ve thought that was funny ever since. I don’t
have pets because of my plants – pets tend to go after plants and can do a lot of
damage to them – but I also don’t have pets because I don’t believe in keeping
animals in a an apartment in an urban area. I think animals need space and a
place to roam around outside, and I don’t have space like that. I also don’t have
pets because I don’t want to be responsible for them. I had a dream once that I
had a barn full of horses – something that I’ve always wanted – and I forgot
about them and forgot to feed them and they all died. That dream was a long
time ago, but I’ve had other dreams about forgetting to feed a cat or some
other pet, and so I guess the person who thought they heard me say I had plans
was closer to the truth than I realized. If I’m too busy doing other things,
maybe those plans that I have, who knows? But if I’m too busy to remember a barn full
of horses or a cat or a dog or a goldfish, then I’m not someone who should even
think about having pets.
I did try to have a goldfish once many years ago. A pet
store that opened up in my neighborhood where I grew up was giving them away.
But I didn’t know how to keep them, and so even though I got two of them, one right after the other, they both
died. I’ve also had things like gerbils and guinea pigs, and once I had a cat
that I was taking care of for a girl I knew from my dance class. But the
gerbils died and the guinea pigs ran away, and the girl eventually came back
for her cat. One of my brothers had a husky named Blue that was such a wild dog
the only thing my brother could do with him was to tie him up behind the barn.
None of those experiences encouraged me to think of pets as good things to have
– in every case it seemed like they were much better off without us humans
trying to domesticate them.
The experiences we have in life are the things that shape
our beliefs. If we’ve grown up with a family with lots of happy pets, we'll think that's the thing to do and it will be easy for us. If we've grown up with a family that was happy and successful, we’ll
think it’s normal to be happy and successful. But if we’ve grown up in a family
that wasn’t, we’ll think it’s normal to not be. That’s an interesting turn of
phrase when I look at it now – “to not be.” We either are or we’re not, we either
feel that we have the right to exist and to be here, or we don’t. To be or not
to be, that is the question, Hamlet said, and as I write this now I think I’m
finally understanding what he was talking about.
In Psalm 46:10, God says, “Be still and know that I am God.”
But how can we be still if we’re still trying to figure out how to just be? In
Max Ehrmann’s prose poem “Desiderata,” we read the familiar phrase, “You are a
child of the universe. No less than the trees and the stars you have a right to
be here.” But how can we know that’s true if we don’t know how to just be in
the first place? Popeye always had his expression that sounds very similar to
the words that Yahweh says to Moses when Moses asks God who he should say is
sending him to the children of Israel. Popeye always says, “I yam what I yam,”
and Yahweh says, “I am who I am.” (Exodus 3:14) But how can we understand either one of them
if we don’t know how to be ourselves?
There’s a disconnect that can happen when we grow up feeling
like outsiders. If in our own home we don’t have peace and then when we go to
school and we’re bullied or picked on or kept outside of the cliques, then we
can run the risk of growing up and reliving those experiences again and again
and again. We go to the office and we’re picked on, we go to whatever job
wherever we go and there’s someone there to bully us. It can happen in church, it can happen in a relationship, it can happen with friends. It happens over and over
until somehow the cycle is broken.
When we come to the Lord, He breaks that cycle. He says we
are His children, and if we are His children then we have a right to be here,
because “The earth is the Lord’s and all who dwell in it.” (Psalm 24:1) He also
tells us that we can be still and know that He is God, and if we know who we
are, finally, when we know that we are His children, that we are His and His
alone, then we can be still, because we can know how to just be who we are.
A woman I know sent me an email yesterday with beautiful
pictures, some funny, some sweet and all lovely, and the words at the end were, “When the power of love overcomes the
love of power, then the world will have peace.” When we have learned who we
are, as children of God, we can know that we have the power of love inside us
and working through us all the time. So when someone comes at us with a love of
power, we can give back to them our power of love, and we don’t have to argue or
struggle, we can just be. It doesn’t mean that you have to lie down and let
people trample all over you – Jesus never said that – but He does tell us to
love those who hate us, and to pray for those who persecute us, to do good for
those who hate us and to pray for those who insult us (Matthew 5:44). When we
know who we are and we’ve finally learned how to just be, we can just be who we
are and let the cursing and hating and persecuting pass right over us. Having
peace is really as simple as that – letting God be God and trusting Him at His
word that the earth is His and all who dwell in it, and that we can be still and
know that He is God.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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