Forced to Write

Coffee, Ritual and The Malevolence of Flowers

It began last summer— a tainted season of existential fuckery, when my gnawing sense of underachievement and spiritual malaise calcified into a failed attempt to be mindful. Specifically, to start the day with “a practice”. The mindfulness scene wasn’t for me— I started gardening. I fucking hate gardening.

There was no way I could have understood the malevolent forces I was exposing myself to, not least the sheer, merciless cunning of flowers.

Exploding like a firework from the top of three converging bamboo canes is a morning glory plant I grew from seed. Defying its assigned territory, a large ceramic pot, the plant thrusts out possessive vines, cannibalising the ornamental olive tree.

Most mornings, I drink my coffee in a triangle of sunlight beside the morning glory plant. Here, I pretend to admire the dawn offering of trumpet-like purple flowers. Sometimes I read books like “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle as a nod to my mindfulness pledge. At first, I try to make peace with the present through Eckhart Tolle, but it doesn’t work. I can’t wait to finish the book. All I can think about while reading “The Power of Now” is the future, when I will have finished it.

My true purpose each morning is to pinch off the shriveled morning glory flowers that withered and died in the night. I didn’t know about the plant’s twenty-four-hour flower turnaround when I planted it. For some reason, yesterday’s dead flowers always feel more urgent than today’s fresh trumpeting glories. If I don’t nip them in the bud, seeds will start to develop, slowing down the production of new flowers in the future.

I would hate to be stuck in a lift with Eckhart Tolle banging on about the power of now. It would make me even more impatient to be in the future than his book. I’d be polite, of course, but inside I’d be cursing Eckhart Tolle and the cunting now. In many ways, tending to yesterday’s flowers is my way of keeping the present at bay. Every time I nip a whithered flower, I notice how little I appreciated it yesterday. It’s a loop where I only ever see the morning glory through the lens of the past. The plant is a clock marking yesterday, and warning me of tomorrow. The present doesn’t seem to exist at all when I’m doing this.

“Oh, how pretty!” my friend interrupts in the middle of a chat about existential dread. The morning glory flowers nod and simper deceptively in the breeze. Our conversation will inevitably end in a flaccid call to arms where we’ll both agree to step into our truth and power, without intending to do anything of the sort. She gazes at the flowers over her americano, unaware of their malignant intent. If only she knew! If only she understood how this rancorous botanical tyrant controls me! I want to say, “Don’t let it hoodwink you with the whole pretty flowers facade”, but people won’t be told.

The plant will inevitably devour the cast-iron bench I sit on. It has an ardent desire for ownership— it aspires to total dominance, sending out special surveillance tendrils, seeking, investigating, groping for purchase, monitoring the perimeter. When it finds a twig, it lays claim, gathering intelligence as much as expanding territory.

I can tell this plant is exchanging messages with a higher power. One of the vines is particularly unnerving. Tightly coiled around a thin olive branch with the urgency of an old-fashioned telephone wire; impossible to uncoil, its grip is brim-full of malevolent purpose. The plant appears to be making an urgent telephone call: an SOS, a coded message, a fucking warning! Each morning, it sounds the alarm with more purple flowers. Their design is no coincidence— gaping like they might bite your fingers. Open, listening, waiting, transmitting, decoding, plotting. It’s safer to deal with yesterday’s dead flowers.

As the summer turns to autumn, bulbous seedpods lurk under heart-shaped leaves, diligently protected by spiders. By October, the seeds resemble pregnant bellies. I harvest them, I’m painfully aware that they represent the bittersweet duality of failure and success. My failure to nip every dead flower in the bud, and the plant’s preordained success in the game of survival. People imbue flowers with benevolent anthropomorphism— not me. I’ve been domesticated.

Even as the plant withers and appears to die, I know this is an illusion. Its consciousness lives on in the small ceramic bowl of seeds on my kitchen countertop. It hollers and complains about the damp until I nestle a few little silica gel sachets amongst the dark pits, blacker than black, as hard as pebbles, absorbing light and matter. Emboldened, the seeds begin to formulate a strategy.

It’s not until the following summer that I’m given new instructions by the plant’s descendant— dutifully grown from seed, watered, nurtured, and feared by me. Make no mistake, this is the same hostile entity, a continuum infused with every essential code and intent. A few weeks of nipping-in-the-bud pass before my commands arrive, but I can feel them brewing like a storm, approaching around the coiled network of green wires. I hear the plant crying in the night — “Oh, the things I would do if I had thumbs!” It births new flowers at dawn. A baby giving birth to babies. I’m struck by the brutal loneliness of it all.

One morning, the decree comes, decoded, translated, and transmitted up through the earth and out of a gaping purple mouthpiece. “Write!” It croaks like a threat.

I dare to lean in. It comes again, louder, more urgent. “Write!”

That night, I dream the entire house has been overtaken by the morning glory —green vines pour out of the plug-sockets in the hall, flowers gape, leafy choke-holds suffocate the furniture. My bed, the kettle, and the toilet have been consumed. The children are gone. All that remains is a green cave, gagged with overhanging leaves and whispering purple flowers.

I jolt awake in a cold sweat. I must write. It feels like a curse. I must write.