The Flower That Laughs

On Being Media Clean for Eight Wonderful Days

Some months ago, on a trek through a tropical wood with my wife, our guide stopped to show us a strange shrub with pink-purple pompom flowers, the Mimosa Podia, a rather ordinary looking plant with a rather extraordinary survival mechanism: when threatened, it pretends to die. Its leaves wither, dry and turn brown. When the danger has passed, the leaves unfurl, turn green and the plant snaps back to life.

I hated it. It seemed cowardly to me, fearful. I was in more of a cactus mood; I wanted something sharp, dangerous, a fighter. Give me the poisons, oak, ivy, sumac; you may harm it, you may even kill it, but in a few hours, covered in boils and blisters, you’ll wish you were the one who was dead. The IDF of the jungle.

I was in a bad place. I had spent the past months caught up in the news cycle – Gaza, Russia, Trump, Harris – and the world seemed a terribly dark affair. War, hatred, antisemitism, the relentless roman shower of misery that enriches the retcher while murdering the retched upon.

I wanted to curl up and hide myself.

I knelt down beside the pathetic vegetation, and recorded myself touching it, watching it cower.

“You know what we call it?” the guide asked.

“Shalom?”

“The shame plant,” he said.

“Close enough,” I said.

And then, the other day, scrolling through my photo library, I happened to spot the video and I watched it again. It had been eight days since the election. That night, in hindsight, though it was not the result I had been hoping for, was a good night for me. A great night. Because when I woke the next morning, I didn’t check the news. In fact, I turned back on all my old web blockers – no news, no blogs, no feeds, no nothing – rebuilding, one by one, the digital bulwarks and parapets of my emotional fortress.

Fort Nothing.

Camp Fuck Off.

And this time, the plant made me smile.

I watched the video again and again.

I loved this plant.

It didn’t seem shameful, and it didn’t seem afraid. It seemed… funny. It seemed like the class clown of the dark and dangerous jungle.

“Watch this, guys,” it says to the other plants and fauna as the danger approaches, as death creeps closer, as the voracious enemy grows near. The other plants tremble. The beast is right upon it now. Souless, murderous, the beast reaches out… and the plants goes dark.

It turns brown, grabs its chest, cries out, “Ya’ got me!” and falls over dead.

The enemy sniffs, scratches his head… and turns away, fooled like the fool he is. And when he is out of sight, the plant snaps back to its feet, shakes the color back into its leaves and calls out, “Ta da!”

And all the plants of the deep, dark wood laugh and laugh and laugh.

illustration by orli auslander