Day after day, chattering, basket-carrying, cart-pushing humans pass me by. Occasionally they stop to sniff my cherry-colored petals or grope one of my leaves, and then continue on. Life in the flower shop is simple, expected, routine. The owners feed me, water me, keep me clean and warm. They trim me every Tuesday and splash me with fertilizer every other Saturday. I don’t have to think about survival. Life is given to me here. I simply exist.

But outside these walls exists an entirely different world, a world of resistance and change, of uncertainty and danger. As perennials, our instincts tell us to live according to an ancient principle: follow the seasons. They guide us through the rise and fall of temperature, the transitions between wet and dry. They tell us when to hold on and when to let go.

And while life inside the shop seems to defy all matters of change, every so often my stem quivers with a visceral sense of anticipation. The sound of rain tapping on the tin roof sparks in me an indefatigable urge to drop my petals. The frost on the windowpanes makes my long, winding vines tremble with apprehension, and I yearn to let them coil in close. But the electric bulbs overhead ensure that I never go hungry, just as the heater guarantees ideal warmth and the A.C. perfect cool.

When the days grow shorter and darker the door through which the humans come flocking remains mostly closed, and the air looses nearly all her life. The sun seldom makes his way through the skylight to gently kiss my petals, and instead beams of fluorescence blister at my skin. I feel my will go weak and I worry about the effects of a lifetime of seasonal stagnation. What will become of an orchid growing up inside a world of unwavering light, water and warmth? What are the effects of an eternal spring – no frostbite, no heat stress, no struggle for existence? Will I continue to grow and bloom?

—

Recently, I overheard a man speaking to his son as the two ambled by. “Change comes from within,” he said slowly, with the type of patience that comes from a decade of fatherhood.

Those few words made me question everything I had forever followed – and feared. Change stems from the depths of our being, I thought to myself, not from the arrival of rain clouds or the falling of leaves. A season is not real. It isn’t even tangible. It is simply a transition – an ethereal, amorphous idea, on the same level of abstraction as that of time. Yet what makes the experience of a transition so significant, so intimately familiar to so many, is the importance with which we weigh the chorus of actions, ideas and beliefs that lead us to this new horizon.

And with that new perspective, I learned to embrace my identity as a domestic orchid. Relatively motionless on the edge of a shelf, I now feel the earth and sky rotate around my very stillness, weighing each moment with the significance of a thousand years. I understand the blurriness of time, and I see the ways in which the past is constantly iterated in the present. I can remember the smell of my first bloom and the taste of my first watering. I can visualize the shape of every hand that has ever touched me, forever imprinted on my leaves like invisible tattoos.

Some say that our lives are marked by external transition – by processes of change that propel us into a new environment or surround us by a different dynamic. But they are not. On the surface, perhaps – for when others look at my life they may simply see a mundane cycle of germination, maturation, flowering, and reproduction. To think that these moments represent the totality of my being is to believe that my life does not exist beyond the physical. Yes, I am an orchid – Ophrys Orchidacea to be exact, a second bloom, cherry-red, and a native of Indonesia. But I am much more than those categories.

I will not tell you who or what I really am, for that is for you to figure out on your own. What I will say is that those moments of reflection and peace amidst a world of chaos are what define my life and what enable me to learn and grow. Moving beyond the physicality of this world can be an act of dignified respect and deep appreciation for oneself, as well as the gentle rhythm of nature.