On Hope, Chronic Illness and Flowers
In the winter of 2021, after a year of the pandemic, things felt especially bleak. The world felt small and dark. And then the crocuses broke through the ground. I had honestly never noticed them before then, but seeing them in 2021 made me cry. I was so in need of their color, but more than that, the hope they brought for spring and longer, warmer days.
Since then, planting bulbs and seeds has brought me an inordinate amount of joy. When the crocuses pop up in the early spring, I can feel hope and some energy returning after a long winter.
A purple crocus is coming up through a pile of winter decaying leaves.
I am not very patient or casual about things planting and growing. I am out there frequently (often multiple times a day) delighting in the miniscule growth that has happened since I last checked. Peonies are my favorite flowers, and when we had space to garden, I bought a bulb and planted it in the fall. I thought about it at least weekly through the fall, winter, and early spring. When I saw other people’s peonies start to come up in April, I was checking for tiny stems poking through the earth religiously.
I had big dreams of this little bulb turning into many bouquets of flowers for us and our friends. Dreams that I shared often with my wife, Val. And every time she would say something like “Hopefully, but don’t put to much pressure on it. You just planted it!”
Hope is tricky when you’re chronically ill. The other times I share wild hopes and dreams, this response is helpful and grounding. When I say “I’m going to make all our Christmas gifts this year” hearing back “If that feels good, but can we come up with some backups if it doesn’t?” is the counterbalance I need. If I aim to make all the gifts and I’m not able to because of different symptoms flaring, it still makes me feel bad, even after all these years of practice.
But with the flowers, I get to have wild, audacious hope. I can take care of them the best I can, which sometimes means daily visits and watering and weeding, and others looks like Val facetiming me to see them from my bed. When they grow, I am overjoyed. And when they don’t, or a slug or a bunny eats them, or one of our dogs tramples over them, it doesn’t hurt as much as when my body can’t do something.
When Lorraine and I were coming up with seasonal rituals for chronic illness, we knew we wanted to include one about flowers and seeds and growth. This year, while I did the ritual, I thought about that hope. To hope is to open yourself up to being let down. A lot of how I manage chronic illness is not hoping for too much, so that when I exceed my hopes or expectations it feels like a gift and it isn’t crushing when I don’t. But it can be tiresome to hold myself in like that.
And I am grateful for a place I can hope with reckless abandon.
A photo of Anna’s peony bush, with one huge light pink peony at the top of the bush and green leaves below it.
Our peony did come up this year, as always. But it only produced one, massive flower. There are other buds, and maybe they will produce a flower and maybe they won’t. But watching this whole plant emerge from the ground and create this masterpiece is enough.
If you want to plant things for the summer, there is still time! And if you want to use our zine to support your planting, I would love to hear how that goes.
