Orchids in Winter

The seasons of my first two years here are often marked in my memory by the jobs I held or secured at the time, and my first winter in Los Angeles was no different. In January, I lost a job at an animation studio, which was the only good prospect The Agency ever managed to send my way. I was so excited by the temp assignment that I forgot to hedge my bets and told my parents that I'd landed a job. The company ran out of money two weeks later and decided not to hire me after all. Hours at The Store also ran out, as they often do in the post-holiday season of tardy returns. I was able to start an assignment at a rather bizarre infomercial production company, but I knew that this post would take me nowhere I wanted to go.
The tedium of the season and the work was lifted by only two things. The first was the sight of the distant snow-capped mountains after a cleansing rain. But much more enduring was the sight of my supermarket orchid sending up a new flower spike.
I brought my orchid with me from The University, even though it had shed not only its original blossoms but all its leaves. But new leaves sprouted, impossibly thick and green, and by February they were joined by a slender stalk bearing four green shiny bulbs of beautiful promise.
The unopened flowers smiled and bobbed at me like the faces of tiny green lion cubs with their infant eyes still sealed shut. For weeks I waited to see the insides of these tiny brilliant globes, but had to accept that waiting was all I could do. The orchid alone could know when the time came for the swollen green bulbs to split open and reveal the wide white fleshy flower with its wet red jungle mouth.
I decided that the orchid was trying to teach me a lesson. Flowers bloom only when they should, not when you want them to. They take time and the right environment to blossom. I would be the same. I had only to wait, to have faith in myself, like a plant that simply does what it was born to do.
After this intense interest in orchids took root, I read "The Orchid Thief." Early in Susan Orlean's journey to report on the overwhelming passions of orchid people, she asks a park ranger in Florida why people could become obsessed with orchids. He replied, "'Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose...Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning.'"
This thought terrified me. Had I fallen in love with my orchid, seen a lesson in it's blossoms, because my life had no meaning? And I realized that the orchid's life was not in fact at all like mine, that it had not taught me anything. That it was just a beautiful thing, like the snow on the distant mountains. It didn't mean anything at all.
But I continued to read the book. I followed Susan Orlean as she slogged through a swamp trying still to understand what made people obsessed with orchids. She claimed that she had never been so passionate about anything. I laughed at her every time she said this. How could she be so foolish? Did she really not know? Or was she playing it coy for the sake of her story? Slogging around in a swamp for years because you want to write a book about it is as passionate as it gets. Passionate not for orchids, but for story, for writing. And for meaning.
If writing is anything (other than an ass in a chair every day) it is a search for meaning. So I have forgiven myself for seeing hope in a potted flower, and accepted that I can find meaning in my orchid if I want to. A story is perhaps a falsehood. A mere fiction, a craftily woven fabrication. But I find my life's meaning in it, and in writing it, I find it true.