Root Cause
Is it a beautiful warning? Mighty Monday vol. 4 asks.
There is a plant for every ailment. Some may be applied like balm, others crushed into poultice. When I think of Chinese herbal remedies, I think of Wang Lao Ji in its red tin can, as ubiquitous as Coca Cola and just as syrupy sweet. Wang Lao Ji is thought to reduce qi and heat in the summer with its proprietary herbal mix. When Coke first ran advertisements back in the 1880s, it too convinced the public of its medicinal properties: this “brain science” concoction could heal headaches, melancholy and the like. A pharmaceutical cure-all created by a morphine-addicted Dr. Pemberton. Western and Eastern medicine seem far more alike than different: two crowd favorites on opposite sides of the world, invented for health but ultimately just consumed for pleasure and profit.
When I consider the idea of home, I wonder about plants. Which ones are native, and which ones are invasive? Which ones are considered beneficial? Many of the fears surrounding plants like the amur honeysuckle surround me as a child of immigrants. Am I native? Am I invasive? Am I considered beneficial? These questions have plagued me, demanding answers and providing only diagnoses of varying mental fortitude over different periods of my life. What does it mean to grow when the goal of so many is to cut one down to size? What does it mean to live when others deem you less desirable?
There are some who can choose to talk about racism as if talking about perennials or evergreens. Then there are those who are perennials and evergreens, who cannot change their stems or roots even if they wanted to. Even if they tried in past seasons and withered. Even when they shoot new buds out of old branches. If they don’t want tulips in their front yards, the homeowners remove them. What happens when you are the tulips in question, so used to blooming and hibernating each year? What do the tulips do when they long to be more than ornamental? When they have bulbs to protect? What if the yellow tulips could scream?
I have often returned to this botanical fact about bamboo: the plant only flowers before their impending death. Various cultures have deemed this rare phenomena either fortuitous or ominous. Perhaps it is both. The bamboo, flowering in mimicry of others bearing fruit, in reality foretelling their own imminent death. Perhaps they yearned for what others had, and in doing so forgot their own strength. All that sky-high, striving growth given up for what? A flash of color? It must mean more. Perhaps it is a warning instead: many deem it a “genetic alarm clock.” Wake up, wake up. Snap out of it. Please believe that something is wrong.
I have stopped drinking Wang Lao Ji and Coca-Cola, beverages more marketing than material. I wonder about the aged bulbs dug up out of people’s gardens because they simply didn’t care for tulips any more. These days, when I write, it feels like flowering. A blooming genetic alarm clock. A flash of consciousness, a warning laced with hope. Perhaps we can change. Perhaps we can snap out of it.