One Root Under Many Flowers

A pond full of lotuses is often one plant.

A wide pond crowded with many pink lotus flowers and round leaves stretching into soft haze, painted loosely so the blooms blur into a field of rose and sage, bare paper at the top

Come to a lotus pond in July and you will see a crowd. Hundreds of leaves, each on its own stalk, each tilted to its own angle of light. Dozens of flowers, some open, some closed, some gone to seed, scattered across the water as if a great many separate plants had each found a place to stand.

Look under the mud and the crowd disappears.

Beneath the surface, a lotus is mostly root: a long, pale, jointed rhizome that runs horizontally through the silt and can grow twenty meters in a single season. Every leaf and every flower rises directly from it. What looks like a pond full of lotuses is often one plant, or a few, each sending up its hundreds of stalks from a single buried body. The flowers that seem to be strangers are the same life, surfacing in different places.

Watercolor cross-section beneath a pond: one long lotus rhizome running through the mud with many stems rising from it to many leaves and flowers above — The crowd, from underneath.

The strangers in the pond

Loneliness is mostly a surface condition. From above, we see separate people doing separate things, each apparently on their own stalk: the woman across the office who seems to have it together, the friend who moved away and started over, the thousand strangers who have sat where you are sitting and felt what you are feeling and left no trace you can see.

Under the mud it is one root. The teacher who taught your teacher. The grandmother who kept a practice you did not know you had inherited. The people who wrote the old books you keep by the bed, and the people who read them before you and are reading them now. Whatever you are drawing on when you get up on a hard morning, you did not grow it alone. It came up the same root that is feeding flowers you will never meet.

Every flower in the pond is the same plant.

Watercolor of two lotus flowers rising close together above the water, their stems disappearing into the same dark water — Two flowers. One root.

Feeding flowers you will not see

The root runs both ways. What rises in you came from it, and what you put back into it will rise somewhere else.

Most of what you do under the mud will never surface as your own bloom. The patience you practiced with someone who did not notice. The steadiness you held in a room where nobody thanked you. The thing you taught, badly and then better, to a person who went on to teach it to someone you will never hear of. None of that is lost. It went into the root. Somewhere down the pond, in a season you will not be present for, a flower is going to open on it.

There is a scarf printed with a hundred lotuses, and I have always thought the title was slightly wrong. It is the story of one.

Watercolor of an old temple pond at evening, lotus leaves covering the water edge to edge, a stone lantern half hidden among them — Centuries of one plant.

Trace one stalk down

A small practice. Take something you are proud of, a skill, a steadiness, a way of seeing. Trace it down the stalk. Who gave it to you? Who gave it to them? Go as far as you can, and notice how quickly the names run out and the root keeps going. Then do the same for something you have given. Follow it up another stalk, as far as you can see.

Every root in the pond, in the end, learns the same last lesson, from the flower it carried: the pod bows. This is one of a series of short essays on the lotus. The rest are gathered here.

Somewhere a pond is in full bloom this evening, a hundred flowers lit by the same low sun, and under the mud they are holding hands.