Dear hibiscus...

Dear Hibiscus

I am glad that I was a bit alert today and that I noticed you. There might have been others like you on the tree but at the moment after the rain when the sun came out, you were beautiful.

You are on a tree which has been around for a while. At one point all the leaves had come off, and the tree had been trimmed. I wish I knew how it is that your tree bears you when other things I am nurturing are not bearing anything.

When I saw you, I thought , yeah.. this is good for another blog. It has been another rough week of trying to get through moments. I have told myself that I have until the end of February to be on a break, but there really is no break and really and truly, sorting out is an immediate , here and now thing.

So Hibiscus, I am glad you appeared today.  I dragged my feet to one work assignment , and then realised as I was delivering it , that I was doing the wrong thing. I found myself wiping the same surface more than once as I was cleaning and probably forgetting others.

The things I cooked were not done well and I know that cooking requires an approach of love and attention and not  the anxiety.

Another work assignment which I think I should quit but can't because I still need the medicine of being paid for work done and for not saying no after having said yes gave me a headache and I had to take tablets.

A temporarily restored connection with a former loved one ended again, brief and the ending was a brutal reminder of the first ending. Like how you are brief and will last a day, I will admire that connection and the memory of love and the pain of loss as brief.

It is strange how I keep repeating mistakes and not repeating successes.  Perhaps there is some script in my head which needs rewriting and instead of writing the blog and I should be working on that script.

A brilliant and wonderful man told me this week he is still on Paxil for his mental health issues and working on tools like expressing gratitude instead of anxiety and fear.

And so I express gratitude to you hibiscus for appearing in the sun with rain drops at a time when I needed to see you. I express gratitude for the pineapple, banana, orange, starapple, mango and apple that I ate today and for the  baigan choka and roti with the wiri wiri pepper.

I wish that I could sleep at night and be alert and healthy during the day, rather than toss and turn in the night and then be restless and tired during the day. But that is the irony of all of this, because then I could express gratitude for the coolness of the night and for the privilege of having a bed and mosquito net and for the lizards on the net which keep me company.

I can't express gratitude though for the strange dreams.

Dear Hibiscus,  I wish I could bloom like you and your comrades.  I know desires are not good to have and that unhappiness results from having desires and being attached to them.

I know there are lessons from you to learn about how to bloom, about being in nurturing ground, about the periods of rest when your tree produces nothing, and about bearing and being useful without even bothering about it.

So Hibiscus, thanks for the lesson which I will keep in mind. There are many times when I think I cannot make it through the next thing and when I do muddle through some of the things , but I will think of you and the others and keep looking for them because I know you will be gone soon.