By Kris Ellery
There are three beautiful plants on my living room windowsill that are pretty precious to me. They bring me joy to look at, but more than that, what they represent is priceless.
One is a string of pearls. I gave my best friend a succulent when she was going through a hard time and needed a pick-me-up. Before I gave it to her I took a cutting first, making our plants sisters. The second is a string of dolphins, a Christmas gift from my love. We were browsing a little bookstore downtown when I mentioned I’d always wanted one. He went back for it later and surprised me at Christmas. I felt seen and loved, and I fought hard to keep it alive because of that. The last one is a string of rubies I found on the floor at Lowe’s. A broken strand someone had stepped past a dozen times, lying there like it had already been written off. I picked it up because I thought I would no longer have the luxury of buying plants. I was recently divorced and still adjusting to building a life on a teacher’s income alone.
I brought it home in my pocket.
Three years later, all three cascade beautifully down the wall of my home. My home, a place I bought on my own, on that same teacher’s salary, by myself. Something people do all the time, but something I had spent years believing I was incapable of. But just like the string of dolphins, I fought for it. And we both thrived.
The part where nothing happens
If you’ve never propagated a trailing succulent, here’s the whole secret: you lay a cutting on top of the soil, pin it down gently, and then you wait.
And wait.
For weeks, it looks like absolutely nothing is happening. The strand just lies there. You start to wonder if you did it wrong.
This is how rebuilding feels. In the beginning I had high hopes. I was going to optimize my resume, take classes, interview, prove something. And I did all of it. For three years. And for a long time, nothing seemed to happen. I started to feel like I wasn’t capable. Like everyone who said I couldn’t was right.
I’ll be honest, I’m still in the middle of this part. The very beginning felt like freedom. Yoga and writing and possibilities I hadn’t let myself imagine. But seasons shift. Some days still feel like standing still, wondering if the roots are actually there.
I have to trust that they are. That’s the whole practice.
I have lived that season. Maybe you have too, a stretch of life where you were doing the work, all of it invisible, while everyone around you and the loudest voice in your own head wondered why nothing seemed to be changing. The rebuilding years don’t photograph well.
But the cutting knows what to do. My only job was to give it the right conditions and not give up during the quiet part.
The part where you start over
I have to confess, I almost lost the dolphins.
What I was doing wasn’t working. They got leggy and sad, and I watched a gift I treasured slowly decline day by day.
Here’s what saved them: I stopped trying to rescue the original and took cuttings instead. I snipped the healthiest strands, laid them on fresh soil, and started completely over.
It felt like failure at the time. It was actually the most loving thing I could have done. The plant on my windowsill today is that same gift. It just needed a second beginning to become what it was meant to be.
Some things in our lives are like that too. Starting over isn’t betraying the original. Sometimes it’s the only way to honor it.
The part where the floor scrap blooms
This spring, the string of rubies bloomed.
A tiny yellow flower surprised me one day, smaller than my thumbnail, on the plant that began as litter on a hardware store floor. That is my hope for myself, and for anyone reading this who is in the middle of rebuilding. Something inside us is already preparing to bloom. We just have to stop seeing ourselves as the discarded thing on the floor.
What three years grew
Nothing about these plants was a quick fix. There was no overnight transformation. Just (mostly) consistent nourishment.
The right location matters, for plants and for people. If we spend our energy comparing ourselves to people with completely different values and seasons of life, we’ll never feel like we’re growing. Good soil matters too. We can’t expect to thrive when we’re running on empty and not taking care of our bodies. And then there’s the hardest part: leaving things alone. We can’t force a transformation. We can only move in the right direction, nourish ourselves, and trust that we’re moving forward even when we can’t see it in real time.
Three plants. None of them turned out exactly the way I expected.
The pearls were supposed to be a gift I gave away. Now they’re a reminder that sometimes the most generous thing you do quietly doubles back to you. The dolphins were supposed to thrive in a beautiful pot in a dim corner. They needed something completely different than what I had planned for them. The rubies weren’t supposed to be anything at all.
And yet here they are, cascading down the wall of a home I wasn’t sure I could ever have, in a life that doesn’t look anything like the one I was living before.
The goal is just to keep growing toward the light, tend to what’s in front of you, and stay curious about what blooms.
It probably won’t look like what you imagined. In my experience, it looks better.
