Flowers In The Desert: A Lesson In Recognizing Love

Have you ever doubted whether you were wise to open the door— yes or no, and why—when love knocked at the gate of your heart? Maybe you weren’t sure if it was really love or something else. It is not always easy to recognize love. After all, how can you be sure?

With this story, we want to show you that although love can be quite confusing, certain omens often appear when you (freshyly) try to plant – and water – a seed that is not a flower at all. Hopefully you can apply the moral to your own life!

Camila lived in the desert, and had never, ever seen a flower.

One day, in a nearby desert, a flower shop opened up – where they also sold fruit and vegetables, by the way. But Camila only saw the flowers, which she fell in love with instantly. At last she knew what it felt like to admire, with her own eyes, a flower-in-bloom, and smell and sniff its wonderful fragrance! According to her rural family, this colorful, fragrant sensation was incomparable to any other experience.

She feasted her eyes on the displayed splendor of seasonal flowers when her gaze was caught by a flower with thin, reddish-purple petals protruding from a sort of green sepal. “Oh my goodness, what a beautiful flower, and what an ugly name,” Camila thought as she read the sign: Thistle .

Camila passed on her order with embarrassment

When she approached the owner to make her choice known, she was ashamed at the very idea of ​​saying that ugly name out loud : ‘I would like a thistle’. Therefore, she decided to simply describe the flower in detail. In less than half an hour, the delivery man arrived on his camel and handed her a paper bag.

Camila didn’t realize it (yet), but what the man had brought was not thistle, but an artichoke. She lifted the plant to her nose, and didn’t smell that divine scent she’d been counting on. The leaves seemed far from delicate, rather coarse and jagged. Still, she decided to put the bulb in water, just in case the violet blossoms needed time to emerge from the green-purple monstrosity.

It was a very sad week for Camila, because every morning she crept hopefully to her misshapen flower (bulb), and every time there was the disappointment: nothing, absolutely nothing, changed. And one bad day it got even more tragic: the artichoke started to rot.

“How can my friends and relatives say that owning a flower is so satisfying when it has caused me nothing but headaches and sorrows?” Camila wondered in dismay.

She decided to bury the artichoke—or what was left of it—in the desert, and held a brief, informal ceremony. After a few days, Camila recovered emotionally and encouraged herself to try a new flower. “Maybe a more resilient, more resilient flower will make me happy,” she thought to herself as she flipped through the florist’s flyer.

A second attempt, after the first failure

Camila soon found another flower, also with purple leaves, which – according to the information on the card – should be able to withstand both high and low temperatures. The name was: ornamental cabbage .

But she also did not like the sound of this name at all, so she again opted for verbally describing the plant in question to the flower seller.

Over half an hour later, the exhausted delivery man brought her a new bag, and Camila asked why she’d let him cross halfway across the desert to deliver an ordinary cauliflower.

Based on her description, the florist had understood that she wanted a purple cauliflower, and since Camila herself had never seen a real flower before, she thought she was looking for some kind of cabbage – at least, until her ‘purple moss’ was going to rot.

Again she put her flower – the cauliflower – in a bowl of water to keep it alive, but soon it also started to decompose, and it started to smell bad. “Oh, that smells awful!” Camila cried, when her entire tent was filled with the smell of fermentation. She buried the vegetable under a thick layer of sand—without ceremony this time—and called her older sister, who had worked in a market garden during her childhood.

How do you recognize a flower?

“They certainly weren’t flowers,” Camila’s sister assured her, after hearing the whole story. ‘I don’t know what they were, but at least no flowers. You can recognize flowers above all by their undoubted beauty, and their delicious perfume. All flowers fulfill those two basic characteristics: beautiful and smelling nice – unless you forget to take care of them, then of course they will wither.’, she said with confidence and conviction.

She ended the conversation by saying: ‘once you see a flower, you know it immediately, without any hesitation’. Months passed as Camila gave her time and attention to other matters, reviving old hobbies and friendships. When she had forgotten almost every memory of flowers, someone unexpectedly knocked on her door.

Flowers always arrive without warning

It was the flower deliverer. He had just happened to bring some vegetables to Camila’s neighbors, and had the spontaneous hunger and impulse to offer her a present, since it had been so long since she had last ordered anything.

The man took a purple plant in an earthenware pot from the camel’s carrier, and Camila breathed a sudden sigh of relief: ‘that, that…..that’s a flower!?’, she whispered admiringly, closing her eyes. close by, and inhaled the aroma up into her nostrils. ‘What a unique, penetrating scent, as if you become – in terms of experience – totally one with the essence of flower. ‘ she said in awe.

The delivery man smiled gleefully, and as he rode off on his camel, he thought to himself, “Luckily I didn’t give her the beetroot, which I intended in the first place.”

The message of this story is clear: love cannot be argued or doubted; it is crystal clear a yes or a no , and not vaguely in between. Love comes without notice, filling you with an authentic sense of happiness. If something looks like love, but you’re in two minds, it won’t do you any good, and it’s definitely something completely different.

*Original story is by Mar Pastor.