The Greater the Regrowth

Endings: I hate them.

And yet I’ve experienced a smattering of these in the last year.

These endings are what one might describe as hard. They are the tearful kinds, the closures you need, but don't want.

I left the city I called home for a decade. I moved away from the apartment that was my home-sweet-haven for more than five years. I ended projects and businesses that have been dear to me for almost all of my twenties. I said goodbye to people I never wanted to say goodbye to.

These endings have been cushioned by the newness of this current chapter of my life — a new city! a new business venture! a new community! — but they still leave a void. They aren’t the endings I would have written for myself, no matter how necessary.

A couple of months ago, after another fresh goodbye — this one especially hard and severely unwanted — I took my old-gal poodle, Bella, on a walk, my mind replaying this recent closure.

There’s a desert shrub at my apartment complex that I frequently walk Bella by. It’s a headturner, this one; they certainly don’t make plants like this in Nashville. But this spring, I noticed — with horror! — that the landscaping team had beheaded my dear plant friend.

They had cut it back completely. And I don’t mean a light pruning; they chopped that shrub all the way to its roots. Nothing remained but a few mournful sticks poking up from the ground like a sad bramble of a headstone. I resigned myself to farewell.

But on this particular night — the one muddled with goodbye — a thought nudged its way into my own hopeless spiral, like a little knock, knock on the door of my brain: “Look up,” it urged.

And I saw it.

My decapitated shrub wasn’t headless at all. In fact, my plant friend was thriving. In only a matter of weeks, it had grown taller than me, flashing blooms colored like a phoenix, all fiery oranges and reds.

I walked by this plant every day. Yet I never noticed the transformation.

Was this the power of pruning? I never guessed that this plant, cut bare to its roots, could return with such extravagance.

“Pruning is an invigorating process,” this article explains. “Generally, the more severe the pruning … the greater the resulting regrowth.”

The greater the regrowth.

You may be facing your own endings, your own goodbyes right now, the kinds you would have never written for yourself, no matter how necessary.

I wonder if this desert shrub could teach us a thing or two. Like just when your hope thins, you look up to find greater regrowth. Just when you thought something was dead, life surprises you with extravagance.

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