The Rubber Plant Foretold It

I envied my mother-in-law’s green thumb. Plants lived long, healthy, thick stemmed lives under her care, but with me they wilted, browned, and shriveled into the potting soil. For decades I tried - I tried and I begged every new houseplant to survive me. I picked the hardiest ones - zz’s and pothos and snake plants. I learned their watering schedules and fed them plant food. I gave them the right light and made sure they didn’t sit too close to the windows where they’d crisp in my desert home. Every plant I had died within months, if not weeks.

And then I burned down the scaffolding that had been holding up my life. I gathered red hot, scaly logs from the chiminea of my soul and dropped them into my marriage, my inherited faith, my rehearsed performances of a good christian daughter, and my attachment to a culty community. Everything went up in flames all at once, fed by the piles of decomposing debris from all those houseplants mirroring my own heart. A wildfire of my choosing took the frames and roofs and cultivated gardens of who I was never going to truly be down to the ground.

If ever there was an unbecoming, it was then. My first true shapeshifting, howling through my body with breaking soul bone, splitting aura skin, sharpening fingers typing feral poetry into the world.

But then, standing in the smoldering rubble a year or so later, a green sprout of Self grew into the smoky light. Green leaves, thick stems, a living body that crawled up my legs and wrapped around my hips. For the first time, I could sense roots drinking from the earth, intentionally tangled through other lives and dreams and singing monsters. And I kept her alive.

The reclamation of my life was a heartbeat, a pulsing artery of sacred breath that dripped from me like blood, like sweat, like grief. The wound, Rumi promised, let in the light. Let in godd. Let in my soul’s story. Healing became a sea goddess’s tsunami racing toward the shore, drenching my wildfires and coating the witch hunter’s ground with salt. The shadowy body of The Church shrank into the soil of my life, taking with it the repression of my greening heart.

Years later, a beloved rubber plant dropped all its leaves. Surrounded by dozens of thriving houseplants, ones I’d named and loved into their unruly heights, the rubber plant quickly became a single dry stick jutting from the dirt. I don’t know what this means, I said to my best friend. But it means something. I put the pot on the back patio, intending to clean it out some other time, but I forgot. A full season passed, summer sweeping through the yard and burning everything in its path. Only the true desert plants survived, and I didn’t even think about the stick of the rubber plant sitting in the sun.

Monsoons rolled through that summer like they do, wild grey days spent with creosote stained wind and dirt colored rain that flooded the street. The days after were sticky and hot, an atmosphere most don’t associate with the desert - 110 degrees and muggy. But we endured. We always do.

And then it happened. When the weather had cooled, the sun turning soft and the nights sharpening into autumn, I found the rubber plant stick unfurling a single leaf. Impossibly, stunningly, beautifully surviving despite… well, everything.

I don’t know what this means, I told my best friend. But it means something.

It means you are going to survive this desert, she said. It means you’re not done yet. It means magic is far more real and basic than you expected it to be.

I took the plant back into the house, placed her carefully in the living room, and watched new leaves form as quickly as the old ones had dropped.

Just before we moved out of the desert, after 31 years of my life spent surviving heat and feral storms (I mean this metaphorically as much as I do literally), the rubber plant dropped all of her new leaves. I counted them every day, watching the final shed of a life lived in the ruins of an inner wildfire. In the end, her stalk was hollow. She had truly completed her life cycle.

I buried her in the backyard, a talisman left in the land that had cradled me through my many graves and my attempts to crawl from them.

I know what this means. It means something.

My life is intertwined with the roots and stems and leaves of the world around me.

I spent too long disembodied, divorced from my own soul, and it showed. That nearly dead energy trickled into the air around me, poisoning the plants and dreams and little souls I tried to nurture. My aura bled. It dripped from my arms, touching everything I loved. And when I finally blistered my hands, setting fires I never intended to call back to me, believing that I, like the rubber plant, had nothing left, I set myself out into the heat of an unrelenting summer. I gave myself to the full force of Nature.

I’d crawled under mesquite like Hagar, leaving offerings gathered from the desert in the early mornings. I’d climbed to the tops of jagged hills, stood with my toes curling over sharp drops plummeting into rivers of slate. I’d buried friendships I could not sustain, churches I could not return to, family connections I could not conform to, beliefs I could not keep alive, a marriage I could not sustain, and a way of being I could not accept.

I’d tied creosote into my hair, the remembrance of monsoons swinging while I moved, a scent so wild, so sweet, repairing the gaping wounds of my aura. I’d unrolled my mat in the back of new yoga classes, dropping into child’s pose for most of the hour. Eventually I’d begun to move an old life out of my body, clearing the ground of dangerous rubble. I’d swept patriarchy’s religion off my skin, breathing it away tedious layer by tedious layer. I’d driven myself out into the deep desert in the middle of the night, listening to coyotes hunt and howl under heavy full moons. I’d stripped purity culture, shame, and fear from my bones, leaving them as smoldering offerings for the goddesses of my lineage.

And now my thumbs are green like the rest of me. My plants unfurl new leaves, crawl up windows and walls, breathe into the ecosystem of my home with a friendliness that is wholeheartedly mutual. A year and a half into this new life, I still remember the rubber plant. I picture her hollow stem and remember that she, like me, gave everything she had to the desert. She, like me, was miraculous. We’d survived something we shouldn’t have. We’d rebelliously, furiously sprouted new leaves in the absolute barrenness of a life post-fire. We’d been resurrected by Nature alone, by unhinged monsoons and a mycelial coaxing from the ground.

When the time came to let that life go, my rubber plant had mirrored the ending. Before her there were all the plants I’d tried so hard to keep alive and they’d mirrored me, too. When I thrive, my plants thrive. When I struggle, my plants struggle. We are far more connected than I had once thought us to be.

The rubber plant meant something. Deep in my inner territory I hold her hollow stem up to my eye, peer through it like a lens. I see myself as I was then - brittle, dried out soulskin yearning for a cold sea. Scars bleeding into sun spots, skin weathering below the too close sun, heart roots burrowing deep deep into the ground. I was the woman who dropped hot coals onto the entirety of her life. I was the girl who strained against the barriers she was born into. I was the 22-year-old who married into a contract she was never sure she could fulfill. I was the baby-faced 23-year-old giving birth to a child already marked by her own deregulated nervous system. I was all those things. And I cannot help but love all those versions of me when I look at them through the long stem of that rubber plant - even though I see it now. I was hollowing then, emptying before the change came.

And I hope, by now, you know that all my stories are your stories, too. If you read what I’m writing and you feel a familiar reverberation, that is on purpose. We, like our plants, are tangled below the surface. We’re meant to mirror one another. We’re meant to tell stories that elicit a gasp of relief. A long sigh. Me too, we whisper into the story.

So it means something, I’m saying it now to you. It means you are going to survive your desert. It means you’re not done yet. It means magic is far more real and basic than you expected it to be.

Someday you’ll look back at the murkiest, driest, hardest parts of your life and you’ll see it, too. You’ve given everything you have to give. You’ve shed the last of a cycle. A shapeshifting has finally settled soft and bright into your body. You can bury the old talismans in the yard, pack the U-Haul, and move into a new life.

It was always going to happen this way. And if you don’t believe me, buy a plant. Name it for yourself. Let it tell you a long and unusual story about what changes in us when we’re the ones setting the fires, clearing the ground, breathing away an old life. Somehow we become the ones we always wanted to be.

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