Nestor Eliiashevskyi
The flower that refuses
to be only one thing only
The poppy is the flower that I associate with my birthday, it grows in the month of my birth here in The Netherlands: June.
Its beauty at its most exposed. A single rainstorm sends the curtain down on the flower, and the whole brief blaze is over. We are tempted to read this as weakness — that anything so easily undone must be slight. But the flower was never the point. Underneath the collapse, the plant has been quietly doing the only thing it came to do: making seed.
This is the first thing the poppy taught me about a psychotic episodes.
What looks like ruin from the outside is so often the most generative phase of all.The person who appears flattened by one storm is not, in that moment, failing. They are scattering.A single seed capsule holds hundreds of black grains, and only a fraction will ever take.The plant does not grieve the ones that don’t.
It is not built for efficiency. It is built for surprise.
And the surprise always comes.
Each spring I am taken off guard by the seedlings — coming up in beds I never planted, far from where the parent stood.
This is what integration actually looks like.You do not always get to choose where the growth surfaces. It arrives sideways, in the corners of a life, months after the season that seemed only to end.
There is an old saying that poppies bloom thickest where the bloodshed was heaviest — the red of Flanders rising out of the most broken ground. I have come to trust this.
The places in a person that were most disturbed are frequently the places that flower.
Not in spite of the disturbance.
Through it.
The opium poppy carries this truth most plainly, because it refuses to be only one thing.
From the same plant come the narcotic that can undo a life and the small dark seeds we fold into our daily bread. Sleep and nourishment. The flower of the underworld and the flower of the kitchen table. We would like the dangerous and the nourishing to live in separate plants. They do not.
The medicine and the poison share a stem, and which one you receive depends on the dose, the moment, the care of the hands around it.
My heart, though, belongs to the one with the black splotch at the base of each petal. Without that dark stamp the flower is merely pretty — pleasant, forgettable. The mark is what makes it hold you.
So it is with a life that has passed through an extreme state. The shadow is not the flaw in the bloom. The shadow is what gives it depth enough to be looked at twice.
At the end of its few weeks the poppy becomes a dry skeleton, rattling with seed, having finished what it came for. This is the part most of our models cannot hold: that the state was allowed to complete its arc, and that its ending is not failure but fulfilment. The skeleton is earned. It has done its work.
We pull the spent plant up and walk the garden scattering its seed wide, in hope of more next year — most of which we will never see come up ourselves. That, in the end, is the whole wager.
Scatter generously.
Trust the fraction.
Let the next spring surprise you.
Anneke Sips
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