FIERCE CHEMISTRY

On roses, machines and friendship

I woke in the early hours with my mind at it again. Turning things over. Returning to the same places, as though another circuit might reveal an exit I had missed.

I knew the stories. I knew something of where they came from, the old injuries they gathered around. I had looked at them, written about them, understood them. Yet there I was, awake in the dark, being dragged through the familiar machinery.

A friend’s voice reached me through the machine. “Do you have any rose?”

I did. I made a cup of rose tea and sprayed a little rose hydrosol across my face and chest. And slowly, something softened.

Nothing had happened to the circumstances of my life. No revelation had arrived. Whatever had troubled me was still there, but its hold had loosened.

For a long time, I thought healing would come through some great encounter. A vision, a breakthrough, an insight that reached far enough into the trouble to undo it. I have had experiences that changed how I understood my life. I have also discovered how much understanding a person can accumulate while continuing to suffer.

There is a particular frustration in knowing your own patterns and finding yourself inside them again. Surely, having seen the thing, you should be free of it? Apparently not. Sometimes you are simply more articulate about what hurts.

And here was a rose.

I am tempted to give it more credit than I can reasonably account for. I drank the tea. I used the hydrosol. I felt some relief. But there was also the warmth, the fragrance, the interruption of getting up and making something. There was a friend, awake somewhere else, whose attention had reached me. I cannot pull those things apart and tell you which one did the work.

I can say that, for a few minutes, I stopped trying to think my way out of myself. There was something to do, something to smell, something to receive.

We speak of chemistry as though it explains away the significance of an experience. Love is chemistry. Joy is chemistry. Some movement of molecules and there you are, weeping at a piece of music or unable to bear the absence of another person. We put “just” in front of it and consider the matter diminished.

I find the opposite more interesting. That material things should have such reach into us at all. That a fragrance might alter the character of an evening. That something growing on a thorned stem could become part of how a person gets through the night.

I do not know what part the rose played in mine. I have no need to turn that uncertainty into a claim about what it can do for everyone else. But neither do I want to discard the encounter because I cannot explain it precisely.

Perhaps I had made my suffering too grand in one particular respect. I had assumed that its depth required something equally deep and dramatic to meet it. The answer would have to descend into the roots, untangle the whole bloody thing. A little relief seemed insufficient beside the scale of what needed resolving.

I have had encounters with Ayahuasca and San Pedro that altered the whole arrangement of my world. Their potency can make quieter encounters easy to overlook. Yet the help we need is not always measured by the force of what we take. In the right moment, in the right company, a rose petal may matter as much as a vision. That night, a little softening was enough.

Relief changes what we can bear. It may give us enough room to leave a question unanswered for the night.

I am wary, too, of making the rose into a benevolent little being whose purpose was to comfort me. It has a life beyond my need for it. Calling plants our companions means very little if all we notice is what we can take from them. The rose does not have to be concerned with my heartbreak for an encounter with it to matter.

By morning, the heaviness had eased. I still had my life to attend to, including the parts I would rather have been delivered from. The deeper questions remained, but I could carry them again.

I remember the friend’s question. The tea. The spray across my face and chest. How little I had expected from any of it.

Nothing had been resolved. Yet, something had helped.