What a beautiful account of the upheaval of moving, Rosie. And I love the evolution of the orchid. Yours is the second piece this week (I’m reading in the UK) to mention feeling the earthquake in Wellington. I love @leahmcfall ‘s weekly missives from the Wellington suburbs, too.
I feel like your orchid is cheering you on in this trying time.
What you wrote about it being picked out by a stranger for a stranger and then dumped made me think of all the creatures we have turned into cheap tat from beautiful living beings. And how we treat them like paper tissues, destined for the garbage heap after a short flash of usefulness. A fleeting decoration.
When I got i to aquaristics I quickly got turned off by how greedy and destructive the hobby was in its widest form. The true afficionados split into two sections - those who would only buy locally bred to protect the original environments, and those that geeked out over the rarest fish and plants well knowing they are being ripped out of some place that used to be beautiful before we discovered this hobby. There’s also a lot of lying on where the plants come from, particularly slow growing ones like bucephalandra, so much easier to rip up old growth than to really run a nursery.
And the people who don’t get that involved…. It’s the poor sturdy goldfish or the betta rotting away in its sad little cup, cursed by endurance. In spite of that endurance they’re unlikely to last more than a few weeks, because people treat them like a colorful decoration and never think to learn about their needs. ‘It’s just a fish’.
I love the story of you and your orchid. You actually took the time to tame each other.
Yes, exactly: factory-farmed life-forms for decoration. In my piece Orchid Hospital, written after I discovered how these orchids are grown, I wrote "To the human eye, their beauty is their use. They are plucked from their own places and turned into a product, like a factory-farmed chicken. Considering that a wild orchid might take 8 or 10 years to flower, 70 weeks is nothing. Force-fed to the favoured state: the fat pullet, the orchid in virgin bloom. Maybe it is better not to be so beautiful or tasty. Maybe it is better to be below human notice, to be ugly or bitter or small. Or old."
It's worse to think about fish!
I'm very interested in rubbish, in things that are free or nearly free- I feel like the rescue-factor levels out the karma of owning something exotic, somehow.
I think it does! My curse is being too interested in the process of everything and thus finding the ugly side of everything when most people have never given a thought to how the orchids are grown. I love that you are saving them. The poor little chickens.
I want to have a climbing vine on my new balcony because it’s finally a good one and I’m determined to make it amazing. So I nicked a tiny rooted tendril off a wild Virginia creeper (that or woodbine, I’m still not sure, they’re too similar) from our local park and I am SO EXCITED I hope he does well over the winter. He’s putting out little leaves already.
I talked about this a little bit in the podcast interview- how I think magic is about seeing the whole life cycle of a thing, and how things are interconnected. Good luck to the creeper! We sing a song, Spencer the Rover, which ends- "And now he is living in his cottage contented, with woodbine and roses growing all round the door; he's as happy as them that's got thousands of riches, contented he'll stay, and go rambling no more."
I love all this. I'm glad you kept your books. I still have tons. It's just as you say that they are connected to past writing and possible future writing. Thanks for the mention - delighted.
To be fair, I had already whittled them down somewhat, last time I moved. Nothing like carrying boxes to make you weigh knowledge by the pound. And I had done some pruning along the way- I was already working on a box to take to my friend Philip (a bookseller)
Life could be, should be, less precarious. Take strength from the orchid.
What a beautiful account of the upheaval of moving, Rosie. And I love the evolution of the orchid. Yours is the second piece this week (I’m reading in the UK) to mention feeling the earthquake in Wellington. I love @leahmcfall ‘s weekly missives from the Wellington suburbs, too.
I'm sorry for your loss, Rosie.
I feel like your orchid is cheering you on in this trying time.
What you wrote about it being picked out by a stranger for a stranger and then dumped made me think of all the creatures we have turned into cheap tat from beautiful living beings. And how we treat them like paper tissues, destined for the garbage heap after a short flash of usefulness. A fleeting decoration.
When I got i to aquaristics I quickly got turned off by how greedy and destructive the hobby was in its widest form. The true afficionados split into two sections - those who would only buy locally bred to protect the original environments, and those that geeked out over the rarest fish and plants well knowing they are being ripped out of some place that used to be beautiful before we discovered this hobby. There’s also a lot of lying on where the plants come from, particularly slow growing ones like bucephalandra, so much easier to rip up old growth than to really run a nursery.
And the people who don’t get that involved…. It’s the poor sturdy goldfish or the betta rotting away in its sad little cup, cursed by endurance. In spite of that endurance they’re unlikely to last more than a few weeks, because people treat them like a colorful decoration and never think to learn about their needs. ‘It’s just a fish’.
I love the story of you and your orchid. You actually took the time to tame each other.
Yes, exactly: factory-farmed life-forms for decoration. In my piece Orchid Hospital, written after I discovered how these orchids are grown, I wrote "To the human eye, their beauty is their use. They are plucked from their own places and turned into a product, like a factory-farmed chicken. Considering that a wild orchid might take 8 or 10 years to flower, 70 weeks is nothing. Force-fed to the favoured state: the fat pullet, the orchid in virgin bloom. Maybe it is better not to be so beautiful or tasty. Maybe it is better to be below human notice, to be ugly or bitter or small. Or old."
It's worse to think about fish!
I'm very interested in rubbish, in things that are free or nearly free- I feel like the rescue-factor levels out the karma of owning something exotic, somehow.
I think it does! My curse is being too interested in the process of everything and thus finding the ugly side of everything when most people have never given a thought to how the orchids are grown. I love that you are saving them. The poor little chickens.
I want to have a climbing vine on my new balcony because it’s finally a good one and I’m determined to make it amazing. So I nicked a tiny rooted tendril off a wild Virginia creeper (that or woodbine, I’m still not sure, they’re too similar) from our local park and I am SO EXCITED I hope he does well over the winter. He’s putting out little leaves already.
I talked about this a little bit in the podcast interview- how I think magic is about seeing the whole life cycle of a thing, and how things are interconnected. Good luck to the creeper! We sing a song, Spencer the Rover, which ends- "And now he is living in his cottage contented, with woodbine and roses growing all round the door; he's as happy as them that's got thousands of riches, contented he'll stay, and go rambling no more."
I love all this. I'm glad you kept your books. I still have tons. It's just as you say that they are connected to past writing and possible future writing. Thanks for the mention - delighted.
To be fair, I had already whittled them down somewhat, last time I moved. Nothing like carrying boxes to make you weigh knowledge by the pound. And I had done some pruning along the way- I was already working on a box to take to my friend Philip (a bookseller)