Keeping plants alive

I had dinner with my friend Stephanie last night, which was wonderfully connecting, as always. I'm so grateful she's come into my life -- she's so wise and graceful and warm and funny. I am blessed with the relationships of my world.

She met me here before we went out for pasta and cheap wine on a patio, and we were talking about plants. I realized I've had this little shadow project since A and I split up to start being the kind of person who can keep plants alive. The verdict is still out on this.

The pothos is the one leaf-turned- toward- the- light in my space. It started out life as a gift from Beth when A and I moved into our first apartment together. It endured a lot of benign neglect for 13 years, occasionally tossed a cup of water, very rarely food, insufficient light. It crouched glumly in the corner of our dining room, not thriving but not giving up either.

A handed it over to me a few months after I actually moved out. My friend had given it to us, it should be mine. I moved it, but left it in the car overnight because I needed help hauling it and its pot in. Early October freeze, bad idea.

I moved it inside and -- as is my wont -- messed with it too much. Repotted it, fed it, watered it. "All fresh and new," I thought. "It'll be so happy now."

Of course, that was way too much stress and trauma. It started to wither, then did the plant equivalent of panting on the ground, tongue lolling. I panicked a bit -- it seemed to represent... something -- about who I'd been, who I could be -- I didn't want it to just disappear altogether. So I took some cuttings, rooted them (while squabbling with T about what the right actions would be), and eventually stuck the new pieces into the soil as the old plant was still dying off.

Today it's richly thriving, basking in the light of my new space. And I'm learning the same lesson over and over with my other plants. Moving causes trauma. Plants do NOT recover from trauma by fussing too much with them. When a plant starts to show distress, yanking it out of the pot and overloading it with activity makes it wither even more.

Plant life, human life, apparently all the same. Learning to not poke the sleeping bear, letting people have their own processing time, trusting that there will be a resurgence of life... hard for me. Learning how to do that.