Twisted

Did you ever notice how some of the most beautiful, useful plants in nature must go through a tortuous, convoluted process to reach maturity?  Yet even in their slow, awkward, painful-looking development, there’s a certain beauty and fascination.  The process itself is where their unique character becomes evident.

Culinary ginger (Zingiber officinale) comes to mind.  A small bud on a lowly rhizome turns into a sharp needly shoot, which then produces strange angular contorted shapes, which slowly unfurl into long slender leaves.  In cultivated plants (in captivity), the flowering stems rarely produce the exotic yellow/red blooms.  But the lowly rhizome bud eventually becomes a tall, graceful tropical plant.

Many of us humans also spend years going through a serpentine, circuitous process of maturing into a healthy adult specimen.  There are many painful twists and wrong turns and dead ends along the way.  It’s a labyrinthian obstacle course.  Looking back, some of the phases may appear  downright twisted and distorted to the uninformed observer.  But these were necessary for the proper development of the healthy mature organism.

If the metaphor fits…

 

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