Bloom Where You're Planted? Or Plant Yourself Somewhere You'll Thrive?
Quarantine has brought out new sides to all of us. Or perhaps it’s unearthed sides of us that were always there, but that we were too busy to attend to. During my shelter in place, I’ve gotten quite into gardening and it’s led me to think about the old adage, “Bloom where you’re planted.”
As far as I can tell the phrase was first popularized through a sixteenth century Swiss bishop named Saint Francis de Sales, and then brought into modernity via Mary Engelbreit in the nineties. Regardless, the phrase is often loosely related back to the Bible and the notion that wherever you are, whatever circumstance you are in, you should will yourself to thrive - to bloom - in this place that you’ve been planted. It’s meant as an encouragement to see the bright side of things and a call to choose joy. A way to ascend above circumstance via spirituality.
But gardening has revealed something that I only had an inkling of before. While you can choose to do your best in a certain circumstance, thriving or blooming in a crappy circumstance, or crappy soil, or conditions that you’re not meant to grow in, can be almost impossible. In some cases, you can provide enough tender, love, and care via watering, shading, moving to sun, and fertilizing to eek out a bloom here or there, but other times, its best to surrender and leave the conditions that make it difficult to bloom and go to the environment that you were made to thrive in.
Anyone who has moved to a new city or state and instantly felt “this is my place” and “these are my people” knows what I’m talking about. It’s as if the imaginary barriers, however subtle, that existed in the old place have been lifted and you are able to be who you were meant to be all along, almost without effort. It’s freeing, inspiring, and beautiful, and it makes you wonder why you spent so much time trying to bloom in a place that simply wasn’t meant for you all those years.
I’ve lived in Minnesota, Arizona, northern California and southern California, and no where has it been easier to grow a succulent than in San Diego. All I have to do is cut a stalk, leaf, or arm off a plant, let it callous, put in the ground, water it sparingly, and boom!, I’ve got new, free plants. I couldn’t keep a succulent alive to save my life in any other place I’ve lived. I’d read blog articles about “The Easiest Houseplants” and “Low Maintenance Potted Plants” all including succulents as a novice houseplant to keep alive and I would always kill them. If I was lucky, plants would scrape by in purgatory, barely growing, not fully alive.
But here in San Diego, plants that I thought only grew to the size of a shot glass are full blown bushes. Potted tropical indoor plants are giant trees. Do you have a fiddle leaf fig tree in your house? I have two and I mist them almost daily and send pictures to my friends each time they sprout a new leaf. It’s a top 10 “baby” in my family and I have a real baby and two pets. I was on a walk with my son the other day (can I hear it for the neighborhood walks these days?!) and saw one the size of an oak tree.
So why are we putting so much time and effort into trying to trick our plants and ourselves into blooming where the soil, humidity, sunshine, and precipitation doesn’t match how our cells were programmed? Why not plant ourselves in a climate that naturally fosters our being, effortlessly opening us up to inspiration and contentment?
