Plant Defiant

“I see you’ve got a cabbage plant that’s still hanging in there,” my son, Dave noticed.

That was during Christmas break. How that plant had managed to make it through most of December, I don’t know.

Then it was late January, and there it was, still alive. It seemed impossible.

“Did you know there’s one green plant left in your garden?” Lori was looking through her binoculars, watching the snow falling when she eyed the lone survivor in my very dormant vegetable garden.

“It’s a cabbage plant,” I informed her. “I don’t know why it hasn’t shriveled up and died.”

Although we’d had a relatively mild winter up until the big snow of late January, we had had several hard freezes with cold enough temperatures to turn all the other plants to a dead, dull brown.

But there was that cabbage plant, decked out in its spring green, standing out like the guy who shows up for a party in the dead of winter, decked out in a derby hat and yellow sports shirt when everyone else has donned thick sweaters and wool mittens.

As Lori continued to peer through her binoculars, I named my plant.

“I’m calling it, Plant Defiant,” I told Lori.

Were I a horticulturist, I might be able to give you the scientific reasons why my cabbage plant had defied the winter elements.

I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation.

But, I chose to give that cabbage the benefit of my lack of knowledge and attribute its survival tactics on a defiant attitude.

“I think of defiance as a having a negative connotation,” Lori objected, after I told her my plant’s name. “You know, like a child with a defiant attitude,” she explained.

My wife has been a school teacher for 36 years, and I could see in her eyes the images of at least a dozen children with defiant attitudes towards the good intentions of teachers.

But defiance can have a positive aspect.

It can push us to stand up for the right thing, for something we believe in, when everyone else tells us to be quiet and sit down.

The negative voices whisper in your ear, “Conform to the way things are. Don’t venture out. Blend into the wintry bleakness. You can’t make a difference.”

Author Irving Stone spent much of his life writing about successful people---particularly artists, thinkers, politicians.

Someone once asked him if there was a commonality among these outstanding people. Was there one thing all those people---ranging from Jack London, to Michelangelo, to Van Gough--- had or did that could have attributed to their achievements?

Stone’s observation was that sometime in their life they had “…a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished...and they go to work…They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified and for years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do."

You don’t have to be a famous artist, politician, or intellectual to make your mark. You only have to be the unique you that you were called to be, persevering in the thing you are called to do.

For some it may be a homemaker. For another, it might be a teacher, or a lawyer, or firefighter.

It’s not so much what you do but that you do what you meant to do, and because you know you are meant to do that thing, you do it well. You defiantly refuse to be and do something that’s not you and not what you are called to do.

And in defiantly saying “no” to the ordinary, you are saying “yes,” to the extraordinary.

The snow slowly blankets my garden, like a mother gently pulling the covers over a child she puts to bed.

Somewhere beneath all that snow, entombed in white, is a cabbage plant that kept on keeping on, and if it accomplished nothing else, it inspired a tired man on a cold winter’s day to say “no” to the voices of derision---the ones that say the effort is not worth it, that it doesn’t make a difference anyway---and instead of giving in, to respond with another “yes” to the call, even though no one else hears the “yes,” or applauds the call, for in that “yes,” is the defiance, the power to stay with it and not give up.