I have had this mini orchid plant for years.
I had originally bought it after my parents died my first birthday without them because every birthday,
Since I've been an adult at least,
I have celebrated my mother because she kind of went through all the hard work on the day of my birth.
So I've always brought her flowers and written her letters on my birthday.
And that first birthday that I had,
I wanted to still honor that tradition.
So I went out and I bought this mini orchid plant.
And at that time I wasn't great at taking care of house plants and I thought,
Okay an orchid seems like something I can maintain.
So I got this little mini one.
It's maybe two to three inch pot,
Just a little bit of dirt,
And just one main stem for the orchids.
And I placed it on my ancestral altar and I took care of it.
It had a little label that said maybe you want to put an ice cube,
Let an ice cube melt down,
But it always said to keep it in the pot.
So I just kind of did that for four years.
And this orchid,
It survived.
It stayed.
But it never really grew.
Like it bloomed every six months and then it would go down for three or four months and then it would bloom again.
And it always had the same three flowers.
It was three flowers.
But it never got new buds and it never had new shoots coming off of it.
And one day I was looking at it,
It was about six months ago,
And I was like,
Why has this plant not grown?
I've taken care of it.
I talked to it.
It's on my altar.
It's something that I feel gratitude toward.
It reminds me of the hard work my mother did to bring me into this world.
But I was like,
Why is it not growing?
Why is it not getting any bigger?
And while I was sitting there,
I was like,
Well how can it get bigger?
It's had the same pot.
It's had the same dirt.
Maybe I should repot it.
And I took the orchid out of the pot and I looked at it.
Oh my goodness,
They were these huge thick roots that wrapped all around the dirt.
And they were entangled with one another.
And at first I thought,
Oh,
I'm just going to repot this,
Right?
So I looked at the root system and I was like,
This is crazy.
It almost looked like a,
You could say like a prison cell,
That the dirt was in the prison cell of the roots.
And when I started to touch the roots and I started to feel the dirt and how tight it was in the roots,
My instinct was to start massaging it a little bit.
And as I was massaging the roots and the dirt,
The dirt began to fall and clump off.
And before I knew it,
The roots were beginning to untangle.
And they were so much longer than I expected.
So I kept with this.
I brought the plant to the sink and I was allowing the water from the sink to just run through the dirt to make it easier to release the roots a little bit.
And once all of the dirt was gone,
I was looking at the awesome root system of this orchid and I didn't want to put it back in the dirt.
I just,
I didn't want to.
So I went down and I got a mason jar and I filled it with water and I placed the plant in the mason jar.
And when I looked at the roots,
They just seemed so happy.
They just,
It was like the exhale,
Right?
It was like,
Oh,
There's room,
There's spaciousness,
I can expand.
It just,
I had this feeling in me.
So I left the plant in the mason jar and it's been there ever since.
And I just take the water out and I replace it every week or so.
And I'll tell you what,
In the last six months,
This orchid has had so many new buds.
It's flowering right now with seven flowers.
It has two new shoots and both of those new shoots have tons of buds on them.
And it just looks so happy and just like content.
If a plant could look content,
That would be this orchid.
And it's only been maybe five or six months,
It's like it was able to breathe.
I didn't even know that it would be able to grow when I did that.
Sometimes we stay in containers because we're told to.
Sometimes we stay in containers because we're afraid of what might happen.
Or we know that the container helps us survive.
Like I knew that plant was surviving for the last four years and I didn't want to ruin that.
But sometimes all we need is a little untangling.
Sometimes we need a little room,
A little freedom,
A little breath.
And sometimes we don't even know what we're capable of because we've never been allowed to breathe into it.
And now when I look at this orchid with its roots expanding down into this water that I change every week,
I feel wonder and I feel expansion.
And it's not because I saved the plant,
Because it was alive.
I never hurt it.
But the wonder comes because this whole time it was capable of blooming.
This whole time it was capable of growing and expanding.
It's pretty amazing.
