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AFTER ALL, THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY
UP, AND THAT’S UP
Sister Mary is reinvigorated.There’s some pretty rich material in all this plant talk. This “manifesting” might actually be more meaningful than the app orig- inally decreed. She carefully considers another book, this one chosen on her return to the WeHo library, where no one accused of her of being famous, but also where no one looked her outfit over—which was just as awesome as the mistaken celebrity thing... this whole replanting was starting to feel good.
Sister Mary then looks to Alice Vincent, who penned Rootbound: Rewilding a Life. Apparently, Vincent had a hard time growing up. “Because things do contin- ue to grow,” Vincent writes in her book. “Plants9 exist to live just like we do, in spite of bad days and confines. In spite of the punishing controls that we suffer under and that we put on ourselves.”
That last line read like a smack in the face to Sister Mary. “How much am I oppressing myself?”she thought, absentmindedly10 feeling the space above her head for a sort of ceiling. Am I the reason for my previously miser- able disposition? Is it me???
THE TIME HAS COME TO
FEEL TIMELESS
How does a flower know when it’s time to bloom? The question nags at Sister Mary as she “hikes” one morning up Runyon Canyon, which she hates. Nothing worse than all these happy people bopping about, she sneers, but then, almost as if she’d fixed herself in some sort of electric response collar (she’d thought about the real thing, but then backed off), she halts her negative thinking and considers the Wikipedia’s she’d hit on the toilet that morning before the hike.
Flowers are the gossiping type, she’d read, which she could relate to after so much time in the skin-punc- turing grip of the fashion industry. So much flower density is apparently a recipe for the whispers. Amongst said whispers are photoreceptor proteins that mur- mur to the plants that it is time to bloom, sparking a molecular process that will result in a shower of colors as the plants start to open up and unravel their petals. A spectacle.
Canada-based and Zimbabwe-born philosopher, entrepreneur, and author, Matshona Dhliwayo, said it best, according to Sister Mary’s extensive googles. “A flower does not use words to announce its arrival to the world11; it just blooms.” Again, a chord struck within Sister Mary, who gleefully waves at a passing couple in his and hers pink sweatsuits. “Did they need permission
9 Minari. Lee Isaac Chung. A24, 2020. Digital.A family of South Korean immigrants
The farm they had been building for the whole movie is set on fire accidentally by
ed, growing successfully.
10 The Shining. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1980. 35mm. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to cure his writer’s block. He settles in along with his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who is plagued by psychic premonitions. As Jack’s writing goes nowhere and Danny’s visions become more disturbing, Jack discovers the hotel’s dark secrets and begins to unravel into a homicidal maniac hell-bent on terrorizing his family. The scene in question? Jack is looking at a small model of the maze, as people outside walk around it. Ultimately, the maze symbolizes the obstacles to connection that accompany family life. Whereas Wendy and Danny’s ties remain strong despite Danny’s frequent possessions, Danny and his father are separated by the maze, which is Jack’s final downfall.
11The Godfather 3. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1990. 35mm. As Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) ages, he finds that being the head of the Corleone crime fam- ily isn’t getting any easier. He wants his family out of the Mafia, but the mob kingpin (Eli Wallach) isn’t eager to let one of the most powerful and wealthy families go legit. Making matters even worse is Michael’s nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia). Not only does Vincent want a piece of the Corleone family’s criminal empire, but he also wants Michael’s daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola). The scene in question? A tomato garden forms the backdrop for Don Corleone’s famous death scene in The Godfather, where he collapses and dies while playing with his young grandson.
12 My Neighbor Totoro. Hayao Miyazaki. 50th Street Films, 1988. 35mm. The story of a professor’s two young daughters (Satsuki and Mei) and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in post-war rural Japan. The scene in question? The girls plant the seeds that Totoro gave them. A few days later, they awake at midnight to find Totoro and his colleagues engaged in a ceremonial dance around the planted seeds. The girls join in and the seeds grow into an enormous tree.
13Richard II. William Shakespeare. 1595. Play. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second of England. This play chronicles the king’s downfall and Richard II is the first of Shakespeare’s four plays about the House of Lancaster. The scene in question? The queen is strolling through her garden and overhears the gardeners talking about how her husband has lost the crown.
14 The Signature of All Things. Elizabeth Gilbert. Riverhead Books, 2013. This novel follows Alma, a botanist, on her journey through life and discovery. Born in 1800 to Henry Whittaker, the richest man in Philadelphia, Alma is the recipient of many gifts and opportunities, and yet she struggles to find happiness in her day-to-day life. Alma buries herself in her work, finding a particular connection to mosses. The scene in question? As she explores the link between life and evolution, Alma falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike, a painter whose delicate treatment of orchids captures Alma’s imagination. We travel across the globe with Alma and grow with her as she struggles to find herself and her roots in a world that is rapidly changing.
to bloom like that?” she thinks, as she concludes the hike. No! And while the old Sister Mary would have vomited a bit in her mouth at those ill-fitting, carnation jumpsuits, to each their own already!
There’s no right moment to bloom, she reminds herself, in the midst of a 37 minute traffic standstill while exiting the canyon (apparently a pack of coyotes had swarmed a convertible and nicked its fresh bag of In-N-Out, causing pandemonium), and she thought about whether Thursday or Friday would make more sense to bloom this week, given she wasn’t so sure what night the big night12 in Hollywood was.
LET’S GO OUT AND FEEL THE NIGHT
As modern and contemporary as she’s feeling, and as repurposed in this whole blooming ambition Sister Mary feels, she’s tugged at again by the realities of the history books. The Incas, she reads, invented numerous methods for harvesting in the sharp slopes of the Andes (“The Hills can feel the same!” she laughs). Through cisterns and irrigation canals that zigzagged down the mountains, the Incans developed breeds of crops such as potatoes, quinoa, and corn—which at the peak of the Incan civilization—fed the vast empire.
New York City is a vast empire13, Sister Mary muses, and considers a bill posting she’d read a few months back about urban farming. She decides to google what she might have missed out on in her time and discovers Harlem Grown, an independent, non-profit organiza- tion that operates local urban farms to increase access to and knowledge of healthy food for Harlem residents. Founded in 2011, Harlem Grown uses programs target- ed to elementary-aged students to start healthy habits at an early age.
This philosophy touches Sister Mary, who can’t quite say that she started healthy habits at an early age—in fact, quite the opposite. Along the way, as
she’s learned in recent weeks, she became her own cloud14, her own obfuscation to nurturing and freeing sunshine... she became spiteful, mean, and toxic, and blamed everyone else for her issues. Sister Mary has
a long ways to go to feeling “whole”, but for the time be- ing, she’s happy in the garden, understanding the plot she needs to map out, the tilling it will take, the seeds she’ll have to scatter, the nutrients that need follow, and the possibility of a promising harvest, just in time for bi- kini season. She laughs at a colleague remarking before her departure that the only culture to be found in Los Angeles would be in that of its yogurt shops, then parks her Zip car at Pink Berry, open-spirited and ready to be nourished by an orange peach mango with brownie bites and gummy bears.
who try to make it in the rural United States during the 1980s. The scene in question? the grandma, who is dying, but then they find the minari that the grandma had plant-
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