Right on Time (but like…how?)

I’ll admit it: I have a brown thumb. Maybe even a black one. Hard to believe for someone who loves nature as much as I do—someone who swears they can feel its life force humming just beneath the surface, connecting everything. I can’t even grow basil on my sunny counter, or mint in my garden (which is a weed, btw. I can’t grow a weed).

But let’s not get existential today. No, today I’m knee-deep in Amazon boxes, wrapping paper scraps, tape rolls, and those air pillows that come in practically every package these days. (What do you even do with those? Straight into the recycling bin they go, with fingers crossed that they don’t end up on some barge, compressed into a monument of collective consumerism.)

It’s Christmas, after all. So it’s consumerism, after all. And you know what? That’s okay. In this house—maybe in yours, too—we’re owning it. Fully paid for on next month’s credit card bill.

So, back to my black thumb. My husband handles all the plants in the house for this very reason. I’m not sure what his secret is, but I’ve caught him talking to them as he spritzes and tends to them each week. There’s a rhythm to it, almost like a ritual (every Friday morning).

Maybe he hears the humming, too.

So, it’s the Winter Solstice today. December 21st.

Our holiday season is about to kick off in just a few days with my oldest daughter’s 23rd birthday. (We brought her home on Christmas morning, 23 years ago—what a gift that was.)

From there, it’s a whirlwind of celebration that doesn’t really slow down until about January 6th.

This morning, I’ve abandoned my usual routines to get organized. Mom has to get ready. As I do, something catches my eye—a houseplant, just sitting there like it always does. A Christmas cactus, I’m told. And here, look.

Do you see what I see?

Yup. Blooms. Right on time. Right on the Winter Solstice. Just a few days before Christmas, and it looks like they’re going to do it—fully open, right on schedule.

Isn’t that something? A little burst of life and color, humming quietly in the background, as if to say, Here we are. We’ve been waiting for you.

So, we’ve had this Christmas cactus for years. Although it’s moderate in size, it’s been around for what feels like forever. I once saw the most gorgeous, beautiful beast of a Christmas cactus— Lisa Nickerson ’s mom tended to it. She cared for it with such devotion over the years that it grew into something truly magnificent. When Lisa’s mom passed last year, that cactus was passed along to someone, carrying her energy with it. I hope it was Lisa.

This little cactus of mine has probably done this every year—bloomed right on time—mostly unnoticed by me. Not for its blooms, of course (hard to ignore even when you’re “busy” and rushing around trying to perfect and all), but for the timing.

And now I wonder—really wonder—how it knew to do that.

Here it sits, in our home, where the temperature never wavers from 67 degrees, no matter the season.

Does it see? Does it count time?? Does it somehow sense the cold snow outside, the shift in the sun’s light, the Earth tilting ever so slightly away in its orbit???

How does it know?

And I know, I promised you I wouldn’t get all existential in this story. But here I am, ending up right there.

Because there’s only one answer: we are all connected. Through this life force. The same energy humming in my Christmas cactus hums in Lisa’s mom’s cactus, in me, in you, in the trees, in the birds, and in the hawk swirling above my house, waiting for me and Sadie and our morning walk (because we are late).

It’s all the same.

It’s right there for us, every day. Call it what you will. I call it magic.

And from this point forward, I’ve decided that the word “beautiful” is reserved for things that hum with that energy. I’ve been using it that way for a while…but making it official today, on the Winter Solstice.

Everything else? It’s just noise.