I am repenting of my former ways in the matter of houseplants. At times in the past, I have gone on houseplant binges, collecting Ficus benjamini, jade plants, wandering jews, ferns, Swedish ivy.... and always these binges have ended in disaster, because I am not good about remembering to water. Funny, how plants are fussy about water. I'd forget the watering a couple of times, and they'd start looking all peaked and shedding leaves. Then, in a spasm of penitence, I'd water them devotedly--for a while, until I forgot again. Strangely, they never came back. One after the other, they died.

But this time--this time it's going to be different. This time, I promise not to fail. I now have a Persian violet and a kalanchoe on my office windowsill, and whenever I get bored, it's easy to stick a finger out and check each pot. When they're dry, it's a nice break from work (or Freecell) to fetch the small watering can and dribble good old H20 in, feeling smugly nurturant. It's a small step then to go water the other three plants, an African violet, the kids' old aloe plant, and my latest acquisition: the spider plant.

It's the end of the gardening season, and the nurseries are selling off surplus stock. The garden centre out at the hardware store was getting rid of hanging plants, and the spider plant was one of them: a ten-inch pot for only $5.99; how could I resist? I like spider plants. I've killed about half a dozen of them thus far.

What caught my fancy about this particular specimen was that it had begun to sling out runners with baby spider plants just beginning to sprout. I've never managed to get one of these suckers to do that, and I've always envied people whose spider plants were festooned with progeny. So I got this one, and it hangs in the window by the front door. Practically every time I pass it, there's another new runner or a new side-shoot with more babies, or the existing runners have grown another few inches, and the babies have grown again. The growth seems ebullient, outrageous. It's almost a hazard getting down the last of the front stairs. There's a small sense that the plant might reach out with its long tendrils and yell "Gotcha!"

Probably some plant person out there can tell me why some spider plants make babies by the dozen and others just sit there, plain and dull. I can assure you that it's not lack of water; if drought conditions made spider-plant babies, I'd have had more luck in the past. I don't think the plant needs repotting either, so that's not it. Something's going on, but I don't know what.

I don't know why, for that matter, some plants seem to do just fine under conditions of neglect, while others will drop all their leaves if they catch the faintest of drafts. What tells my lilacs to send out runners under lawn and driveway, to start new colonies by the front porch? What motivates my spiraeas to go nuts with new growth every time I give them a haircut? (Never mind what gets all the blackberry canes started around the property; I know whhy that happens!)

And these are only plants, which are, God knows, uncomplicated compared to the average human life, much less the un-average one. How do we explain why some people, under extraordinary adversity, manage to bloom and create and flourish, while others seem to fade at the faintest touch of a north breeze? How can we understand why one baby, raised without quite enough caregiving love, seems to come through intact, while another is terribly warped and damaged? There are mysteries here.

We keep thinking we can analyze and understand the human psyche, but it slips away from us like a trout in the water, wriggling out of our grasp and darting away. It just ain't that simple. Every system we come up with has a piece of the truth, but never the whole truth, and often a piece of truth becomes false when it's only a piece. We think we can somehow resolve the nature/nurture issue, neatly compartmentalizing people and their problems into this or that category. It doesn't work. The profoundly damaged have a spiritual life as rich as any saint's. Not one of us isn't a wild mixture of the sane and the sick, the whole and the unholy. Not one of us fully understands his or her own motivations and assumptions.

Only God knows who I am and why I seem to go in particular directions --why I fling a shoot over the edge of my pot, erupting into a cascade of creativity and life, and why a whole set of my leaves curl up and turn black, for no apparently good reason. Only God fully understands the twined strands of your nature and nurture, the choices you've made, the things you haven't had any choice about. Only God can sort it all out in the end, gently untangling all our knots and confusions and laying our lives out, with fullest understanding, touching us here, fingering a strand there, with perfect knowledge: mercy and truth met together. Only God sees as we so desperately want, and so desperately do not want, to be seen, and fully understands as we want, and do not want, to be understood.

There are still, however, a few obvious things. Damn few plants can go unwatered for long without dying. Damn few people can survive neglect and trauma and adversity for long without being damaged, however healthy they were when the trouble started. Plants need sun and water and nutrients from the soil. People need a sense of safety and predictability, love, the chance to shine.

I don't blame the plants I killed for dying. They were just fine; the problem was my neglect. Somehow, though, we think it's okay to blame the poor for all their problems, or we accuse the traumatized of "making it all up" or bringing it on themselves or failing to snap out of it. True, there are people out there who are genuinely evil; there are also people out there whose own damage makes them damaging, who are soul-sick and resistant to any healing. There are people out there who are a whole lot worse than we are. But that doesn't excuse what we do to others not only through violence, but through indifference or self-righteousness or (above all) selfishness and sheer laziness. My previous failures in houseplant management were no mystery. Sloth, pure sloth.

I see the kalanchoe has a whole bunch of new leaflets and another flower spike forming. Boy, it feels good to be doing things right, for a change...