the crazy stops here…every fifteen minutes

I’ve always struggled with uncertainty of any magnitude; my mind seems to ruminate over pending outcomes with all the fervor of a needle stuck in a vinyl groove, playing the exact same refrain until the record wears out or the needle breaks.

Impatience, a need for control, general insecurity- I’ve suffered all these faults, and surely will again- but uncertainty provokes something within me when none of those issues is at play.

Even when a situation can only end two ways, either could be considered advantageous, and there is a known time frame for resolution, I’m still a wreck.

Faith would contend that everything happens for a reason, taking comfort in the “rightness” of either outcome. Logic would dictate focusing elsewhere until there is enough information to form a response.

I am not a man of faith, nor a man of logic. I am a woman with a healthy dose of skepticism for the all too common practice of relying too heavily on either.

My intuition is my north star; I close my eyes, ask myself what the answer is and listen very carefully and quietly for the feeling to roll over me.

The glaring weakness of this strategy is that pesky habit one has of favoring their preference; we tend to confirm our own desires. An emotional stake in the matter at hand clouds my intuition, and acute awareness of the possibility that my compass is miscalibrated leaves me dizzy with doubt.

I paid a hope tax to balance out the entry.

The things I wanted most I refused to believe in, my own little fucked up emotional insurance policy against disappointment and shame. My intuition written off to reconcile my desire and fear.

Which isn’t altogether a flawed formula; it simply attempts to account for the failings of human nature and reduce the risk that my trademark intensity brings to the use of deep knowing. Admirable goals, all.

It’s awfully exhausting though, all that hoping-not-hoping, knowing-not-knowing, wanting-not-wanting wears a girl out and thins her focus. It’s unproductive, particularly when I’m right more often than I’m wrong.

There isn’t a disappointment I cannot bear; all of my worst nightmares came true, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Things I wanted too badly to believe in happened effortlessly, and things that seemed safely logical evaporated like summer rain on hot pavement. My emotions, thankfully, do not influence the workings of the universe.

So. A girl can hope, right?

Right.

Blossoms, for all their intricate beauty, are fruitless without pollination. Their purpose is to attract bees, birds, and butterflies to send and receive their magic fairy dust, the secret code that unlocks fruit and seed production. Fertilized or barren, the spent blossoms flutter from their stems after a short and exquisite show; the legacy of the plant relies on fruition.

Only pollen with enough genetic variety to produce healthy offspring will result in reproduction, which is why most plants require cross-pollination. Fruit borne of their own pollen alone would produce weak stock, vulnerable to blight and sterility, so a molecular defense exists to encourage only successful genetic combinations.

At breakfast the other morning, Wendy pointed out a forsythia bush on the edge of the parking lot. It was covered in half-open blossoms, spent before they could unfurl. I wept for it later, the poor sweet thing, doing its humble best to send fairy dust into the world, expending all that effort and energy desperately pushing flowers into a dormant, barren landscape. Tricked by unseasonably warm temperatures into performing for empty rows of hard metal seats, with nary a honeybee to carry its whisper, and only silence on its carpels.

Nature, for all her exquisite wisdom, delivers such cruelly objective consequences for her creatures’ timing errors. When the blooms open at just the right time, a pollinator that favors that plant and its best genetic crosses will visit just long enough to dance the timeless waltz of creation on its petals, leaving dreams and carrying wishes away on their furry legs and antennae.

The promise of fruit is made that very moment; if the plant is given enough sunshine, water and fresh air but is left otherwise undisturbed, the next generation will push forth from the stems, sent from deep within the all roots and veins, cell by cell, to make new life in the soil below.

The forsythia will most surely find itself frostbitten, frozen over, flowers encased in a coat of icy shards that will cut them to shreds upon thawing, leaving a pile of rotted mush to seep into its roots, inevitably restarting the cycle of life, birth and hope under the ground. Another chance to get it right.

My heart ached to impart some comfort, to reassure it that the secret workings of the universe are as impersonal as gravity: when the season and conditions are right the magical becomes the inevitable, the soil is richened for its failed effort, time and wisdom produce fruit sweetened by experience and patience. Gratitude for its timely reminder seeped from the marrow of my stiff and tired hips: buds and berries set on their own time, in their own way, thriving on a lack of human interference in the magic of nature.

It will have learn on its own the difference between January and March, and the futility of blooming at the first signs of warmth instead of having enough faith to wait for spring, that opening is just a start. In its struggle, it will discover that the beauty of its blossoms are just a vessel for its essence, which lays in wait for that familiar ancient whisper to awaken it to fruition.

I smiled as I wiped the tears from my cheeks, though, because I know the joy of mastering those lessons: an entire existence dripping with life and sustenance from every stem and branch, with roots enough to anchor and nourish, and wishes given flight on the wings of bees.