Moonflower

Reeve Lindbergh, daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, has followed in her mother's footsteps as a writer. Reeve is a children's author, novelist and poet, and in 1988, her memoir of her life as a child growing up in Darien, CT was published. Their large home had three porches, and she reminisces about her mother's porch.

I once sat with my mother for an hour there on a summer evening, waiting to see a moonflower bloom. The plant itself was set in a large ceramic pot on the table, and the flower when it eventually opened was white and headily fragrant, like a camellia. It uncurled in a slow spiral at its appointed time, not smoothly as in time-lapse photography, but with little jerks of motions that were more convincing to me than smoothness, even then. Nature's openings, and her closings, too, are not so easy, in my experience, and are usually anything but smooth. They are hesitant and awkward, and frequently unwilling, even if inevitable. I want to hold my breath at birth and death, each time I come close to them. I want to close my eyes and pray, without certainty of any kind, that everyone involved will somehow make it through.

Nature follows its own timetable and rhythm. So must my own soul. If I try to hurry it along, to assume a rhythm alien to it, nothing good happens. And when my soul is ready to give birth, I must allow for those "little jerks of motions" that may very well feel like upheavals, convulsions that I fear will totally shatter me. They will not, of course, any more than the unsmooth, messy and exhausting birth of the child shatters the weary but grateful mother. My soul will make it through, darkness will give way to light, life will open and blossom forth, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed.

I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord.

~Psalm 118:17