Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
“Japanese Maple,” Clive James
The theologian Kallistos Ware wrote that Now is all we really have: the past and future exist only conceptually, framed by present experience. Now, in this framework, is the truest thing conceived. And so, Now is a little gift of eternity inhabiting every physical moment, Now is a crack of light burning into the ether.
Now seeps through my window panes onto the anthurium flowers that my boyfriend gave me for Valentine’s Day. The anthurium is all tall green leaves, except for the flowers, which are bright red and shaped like hearts. I loved the plant when I first received it, as I love the idea of sustaining a little life in my apartment. My anthurium was special, though: the aliveness of the gift immortalized the exchange between its giver and me. It was not a grocery store bouquet, destined for a quick life of wilt. With the passing of the seasons my gift would prosper, and through it I would preserve the past.
Until I couldn’t.
My perpetual Past, which I’d sustained as my everlasting Now, was over in what seemed a spontaneous movement of time and space. My flowers were dead. Maybe the moment they represented had died too.
I noticed that three of the four heart flowers fell off, seemingly all at once, on a bright August afternoon. I felt upset and, even more, guilty. I assumed immediately that I had failed in my care. I probably hadn’t given my plant enough water; I probably should have opened my blinds more often; I probably should have pruned it more. Probably. My perpetual Past, which I’d sustained as my everlasting Now, was over in what seemed a spontaneous movement of time and space. My flowers were dead. Maybe the moment they represented had died too.
September came. I kept watering my anthurium for the one flower that remained. I made myself more disciplined—each Sunday now, I practiced my hopeful little ritual and prayer: water the plant, examine it for dead leaves, examine it for life. Mostly, examine it for signs of the Past.
For a while, nothing.
Only then could I receive the precious gift of Now, of rebirth, that the plant has wished to offer to me all along.
But then, October. A tiny red bud appeared, and then another, and then another. Now pierced through the Past with the fervor of new life, this time with a flower-shaped crack in the void. Oh, how I’d missed the point entirely! The Past lives in me forever, but Now is the truest thing. In terms of physical presence, what was must surrender to what is. In truth, I simply had misunderstood the plant’s life cycle. The flowers that lived on my first day with the anthurium had to pass on and give away their resources for new buds to spring up from the dirt. Only then could I receive the precious gift of Now, of rebirth, that the plant has wished to offer to me all along. My moment of receiving, though gone in its original presence, is reborn each day as buds come up, and as their heart-shaped brothers breathe in their last rays of sunlight before surrendering.
What is Now, but Time’s gift to us? By my acceptance that the Past has gone, Time allows me to experience the beauty of Now, the truest form of existence. And so, I’ll sit at that window of revelation in my bedroom, and watch the sun pour in and onto my flowers, content in where I am. The buds speak; telling me how beautiful it is simply to exist in the present.
