I have a plant in the office. I inherited from someone who left, it was
his mother’s. It’s like a little palm-tree, a trunk with a hairdo of leaves at
the top. I feed it cold tea daily, my little ritual. My hands get very cold on
the computer keyboard, and I make a cup of tea every half and hour to warm my
hands around it. When it gets cold, I give it to my plants.
Every now and then I give the plant a haircut, when the tips of its
leaves get dry. When I do, I also offer a haircut to the guys in the team,
snipping my scissors. I am the only girl. They laugh.
This year I had to give my plant a zero haircut, because all the leaves
dried out. I don’t know why, and I felt sad and guilty. For a while there was
just a bare trunk left, an odd pole sticking out of a flowerpot.
Then a few leaves appeared from the ground, from the roots. I kept giving them cold milky tea.
Yesterday, as the working day was coming to an end, and I was clicking
the X of the software I work with to close it down, I smelled a new scent. I
looked around at the guys, to see if any of them was putting on any perfume for
the evening.
Then I took my cold cup of tea to the plant. It had blossomed. That’s
where the scent was coming from.
I looked it up on the internet. Wikipedia says the English call it “corn
plant”, because its leaves look like those of corn, and it is a holy plant for
the chagga people of Tanzania.
Something quietly holy has been living alongside me, through my daily
work with a grey financial software.
Without knowing, I have kept alive with my tea not only the divine spark
that is my body and spirit, but also this green spirit of an old, faraway
forest. And I still don’t know why it was holy for those people of Tanzania.
This plant has come all this way, stripped of its old meaning and
legends, to sit beside me in my office, useful and decorative.
How about my meaning and holy legends, hidden behind the software?
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