Orchid / Roots

When you buy an orchid from the grocery store, it’s housed in a plastic cup with wood chips and small breathing holes, then placed inside of a larger porcelain pot that widens at the top, an “orchid pot.” It looks beautiful and polished on the outside, but any orchid collector knows the turmoil beneath the dirt.

As soon as the orchid is brought home, the collector gently pulls it from the plastic cup by its root base, revealing what she knew would be the case–an entanglement of dead roots, mixed with healthy, old with new. A new collector would be timid; a seasoned collector reaches for the scissors.

She snips away the dead and dried up roots–looking like a skeletal version of their former selves. Dirt flies as she flings the dead roots overhead into a pile of death behind her. The orchid feels relief as the weight of the roots is snipped away, one at a time, no longer required to send energy to dead places. The collector re-pots the orchid without the plastic cup and the orchid smiles up at her.

She felt symbolic this October and gathered up the orchid roots, placing them in her backpack. She walked into the woods, confident and free, birdsong in her ears, the crunch of the earth beneath her feet. She dug a hole and buried the roots at the foot of a mother tree, then turned her back on them.

“How does it feel?” She screamed.

But they could not hear her, so she asked herself.