By Jennifer Batchelor
@jennbatchelor

“Happy Saturday from Lotusland!”

The text came through on a Saturday in December. I was in the middle of folding a week’s worth of laundry while listening to my husband whisper-swear as he laid new flooring in our son’s bedroom. My friend Anna was having a more adventurous day; she’d taken her fourth grader to Lotusland, a botanical garden not far from her home in Santa Barbara. Because she is excellent at sharing beauty and joy with everyone she encounters, Anna peppered our group text with photos and fun lotus trivia all morning. 

“Look at this one!” she enthused, sending a photo of a stunning purple bloom. “Also, did you know that a lotus only blooms for three days?”

“Just like my patience,” quipped our other friend on the thread. I smirked as I matched socks. 

“C’mon, guys. See the lessons in nature,” Anna cajoled. Grinning, as her desire for us to experience this with her all but radiated through the screen, I picked up my phone and began to type.

“No, I think I get it,” I responded. “Celebrate scarcity and all that. I mean, there’s no such thing as Dandelionland, right?”

Anna was pleased that I appeared to be embracing the day’s nature lesson, and I tossed my phone back onto my bed as I started putting away the stacks of clothes.

“Sonofa …” Jon’s muttering increased in volume. “Love, when you get a second can you come help me?” he called.

“Be right there,” I said, and went to stand on a particularly stubborn plank as he tried to maneuver it into place. Between the thuds of the hammer, my mind wandered back to Lotusland. I’d told Anna that I got it, and I thought I did. I just wasn’t sure I agreed with it.

The hopeful part of me marveled at the beauty of the blooms and the fleeting nature of their splendor. But my inner cynic—always a strong voice but operating at near-top volume as of late—had the final say before I was pulled from my thoughts.

An entire botanical garden for a flower that only lasts three days? What a waste.

***

My husband and I have an ongoing difference of opinions about, well, all of this. By all of this I mean: the pandemic, the loss of his job last spring and subsequent four months of unemployment, homeschooling, generally seeing no one and going nowhere, the death of my grandfather from the disease causing the aforementioned pandemic, and the, ah, general state of our country and its tenuous grip on republican democracy.

I, quite frankly, am reeling a bit. Oh, I put on a stoic face. I keep moving forward, doing what I need to do. But I hold my grief and my worry and my anger inside me. I add them up, carry them until I can’t and fall apart for a few minutes, and then I scoop it all back up again and keep trudging forward. I line my pockets with facts and data and memes. My daily screen time averages would horrify you. 

My consolation is my assumption that everyone is like this—we’re all pretending to be more or less fine. We’re all lying our faces off. 

Meanwhile, Jon mentions a coworker caught up in the same round of layoffs last March is still looking for a job, while Jon started a new job in July the week before the unemployment benefits ended. “Can you believe the timing of that offer?” he marvels. “We were so lucky.” He sends me a text from our bedroom where he’s quarantined—mostly symptomless but with a positive test result after being exposed to COVID on a work trip. It’s the CaringBridge site of a colleague’s daughter with a brain tumor. He says, “I’m so grateful for our health,” while setting up a recurring contribution.

If Jon and I were the first two people to discover the lotus flower, I think we both would’ve noticed its beauty. Whoever saw it first would’ve grabbed the other’s sleeve. 

Look at that flower, we’d say. Isn’t it stunning? And the other would nod in agreement. 

Then I’d be off to study and read about it, because I’m the one who researches everything ad nauseam. I’d come back to tell him that it only blooms for three days; cynicism would creep into my tone, and I’d say something like, “Figures, that a flower that lovely wouldn’t last.” 

And Jon would hush me softly and say, “I know, because I stood here and watched it the whole time.”

I’d bring my facts. He’d bring his experience. We’d end up in the same place, but who would you rather be?

***

In his poem, “Such Delicious Absence,” Brian Doyle writes, “We train ourselves to play loose defense all the time, to patrol the perimeter, to calmly expect news that will not be thrilling … Yet whole hours go by, whole days, bursts of days, maybe a week, when wrong goes right past like it caught the wrong bus and isn’t paying close attention to the address. It will be back, sure it will; it never stays lost—but we should maybe mark and sing and savor and relish and revel in such delicious absence more than we do.”

Some of us are bad at reveling. And some of us plan field trips to Lotusland.

***

Last week, I found myself three pages into Google results about lotus flowers. They’re commonly known as water lilies and can live for an incredibly long time. The oldest one on record is more than 1,000 years old—the same seed, blooming over and over again for a millennium. I learned that they can put roots down in almost any aquatic environment—the dirtiest water often yielding the most beautiful flowers. They are symbols of resilience and longevity in many Eastern cultures, considered a botanical manifestation of the human spirit.

In all of the articles and research, the brevity of their blooming season is a footnote, an irrelevance. After all, who cares about a 72-hour window when it’s repeated in perpetuity for a thousand years?

I learned that Lotusland was designed and cultivated by a Polish emigrant, Ganna Walska. She escaped France on the last commercial passenger ship before the German occupation of France in World War II, bought the property with her sixth husband (whom she eventually divorced), and was heavily involved in the sourcing and placement of every plant in the garden. Upon her death, ownership of Lotusland passed to her foundation, and it opened to the public a decade later.

Walska didn’t build a botanical garden for a flower that blooms three days. She built it for one that endures for centuries.

I was wrong.

The lessons of Lotusland have nothing to do with scarcity. Instead, it’s a celebration of a flower that, come hell or dirty, stagnant water, is going to keep blooming. Briefly, but it’s okay if you miss it. Because it will be back, again and again and again.

I needed facts to get me to where Jon and Anna and Brian have been waiting for me, marveling at the delicious absence of things going wrong. Resting in the assurance that when we allow for that absence, we make space for joy. Gratitude. Beauty.

The best part? By definition, absence is weightless. I don’t have to hold a thing.