Queen of the Night

What the Queen of the Night flower teaches us 

Yesterday we had just come back from a picnic with friends in a lovely park. As I was unpacking and putting things away, my husband called me. You have to come — the show is on. He had been watching the buds of the Queen of the Night starting to appear and sprout upwards for a few days, and he knew that the show was about to start. Which night it would be we wouldn’t know. But this evening, it happened.

I walked into our main bathroom which has a big skylight and is perfect for plants. Combined with my husband’s green thumb, it can be a paradise of a flower garden. My sister had gifted us this incredible Queen of the Night plant. In fact, all the friends who we had picknicked with are walkers; we walk almost every weekend, and often we do walks in tulip gardens or orchid gardens, and each of them have at least one gardening spouse in the house. Our WhatsApp group is full of gorgeous flower pictures, including those from trips abroad to famous royal gardens.

I walked into the bathroom and was staring at a trifecta of Queen of the Night. Three- not one- beautiful big flowers had made their regal entry and bloomed upwards to the skylight in their full glory. I stood there mesmerized and enchanted. I started to think of how soon they would be gone. So I started to whisper love and appreciation to them. I was in the presence of the mystery of life, of nature, of beauty, of love. It was a precious gift — a reminder of beauty and transience.

How intricate the design- the layering and different sizes and styles of petals were exquisite. How delicate the off-white petals- almost translucent and ethereal…a signal from the Divine of pure and sublime beauty.

I remembered taking my cousin from Dubai to Metropolitan Museum of Art many years ago, and we both felt sensory overload after half a day of walking in the museum. Well, when you see flowers like these bloom, it is a sensory overload of a different kind. Or maybe it is a cognitive dissonance- how could something so beautiful come to exist for only a few hours? How did all three of them know how to bloom at the same exact time? You look at this incredible miracle, almost as you would at any beautiful flower but with the added magic or horror of its demise in a few hours. What is this flower teaching us? For nature is there to teach us and to remind us of our roots and of our souls. It reminds us how beauty transforms us to another state; how transient it is; it reminds us to be grateful.

This morning I went into the bathroom, and saw the flowers hanging their heads. They had performed their magnificient show, and now went back to their limp state to come back again some day…a mystery to intrigue us and a joy we will wait for again and again. I appreciated the private showing for me and my husband, with no children or grandchildren around as it is always in the night, and perhaps always on a weeknight.

As I went to bed, I started watching TV and the horror shows going around all over the globe. The earthquake in Morocco. The floods in Libya. The mountain collapse in Tibet. Nature’s fury unleashed to cause massive destruction. I don’t even bother looking at the wars and famines and civil wars anymore — I cannot even bear the sights of human made destruction.

And I thought of these delicate flowers who had put on their show for us only. How do I hold both thoughts in my mind at the same time? How can the human heart contain both states of beauty and destruction? This is the mystery of life and the Universe.