Why Would You Bloom If You’re Just Gonna Die?

I had been in Chicago for seven years when I first walked into the Garfield Park Conservatory. Graduate school was behind me. A career in public health was well underway. And something, quietly and then less quietly, had started to come apart.

The job had stopped loving me back. That’s the only way I know how to say it.

I had spent years building an identity around that work, earning degrees for it, moving my whole life toward it, and somewhere in those years the transaction had gone one-sided. It just felt like a slog. Tired all the time, easily distracted, nothing on the horizon that made me want to get up and go toward it. The gnawing feeling of a passion that had gone quiet.

I had been here before, had walked away from years of violin training once already, had survived one version of remaking myself, but knowing the territory doesn’t make it easier to be lost in it.

That’s how I ended up at the Garfield Park Conservatory for the first time. My friend Deanna, one of those people who knows a city the way most people know their own living room, suggested it one afternoon. She’d been returning there for years. I walked in and felt something shift, the way a room can change the pressure in your chest before you’ve even figured out why.

There was a plaque near the American Agave. A century plant, taller than the people standing near it, with leaves like something prehistoric. The plaque explained that the agave spends years, sometimes decades, doing nothing but growing. Building. Storing. And then, once in its entire life, it sends up a single bloom, puts every bit of energy it has ever accumulated into that one flowering. And then it dies.

I turned to Deanna and said, “Why would you bloom if you’re just gonna die?” She looked at me and said, “Yeah. I think that’s the big question, right?”

I went back again and again that year. For events, on weekday afternoons, alone most of the time, in the dead of winter when the warmth inside felt like an oasis and in the heat of summer when walking through was more of a hike than a visit. I read books at the cafe tables. I bought things from the gift shop. Everyone around me knew it had become my happy place, even if none of us had words for what I was actually looking for there.

I had started buying plants for my third-floor apartment. Just a few, from the local garden shop, nothing dramatic. I obviously wasn’t thinking “farm” from my Logan Square apartment. I was just drawn to something living and beautiful that had nothing to do with office walls and bus stops and the daily accumulation of a life I wasn’t sure was mine anymore.

Plants just represented more. Something pulling me toward itself without being able to name what it was.

I had no idea what was coming. I just knew something was stirring.

Looking back now, I think I was the agave in that season. Storing up. Not yet ready to bloom, but for the first time letting myself wonder what it might actually cost to try.