What does onion grass, with its dazzling magenta and yellow flowers, have in common with people who find themselves caught up in a life situation that doesn’t feel like a good fit?
Onion grass grows prolifically in spring in our local area and its bold magenta flowers with bright yellow centres make a stunning picture in stark contrast to the sea of wiry bottle green leaves. Yet this attractive South African native is considered a weed here in Australia and other countries in the world where it has naturalised.
Someone once said that weeds are just plants growing in the wrong place, usually the result of human intervention. The same could be said of people who don’t seem to fit in a particular situation in their life: They’re just caught up in the wrong place.
Onion grass was initially introduced into Australia as an ornamental garden plant. Its flower has a beauty of its own that no doubt made it an attractive prospect for show in the home garden. Sitting atop bright green stems the length of a pencil, the magenta and yellow blooms, about the size of a toenail, open during periods of sunshine to reveal a dazzling display set amongst masses of grass spears. When the light fades on cloudy days and at dusk, the blooms quietly close, hiding their beauty until the warm rays of the sun coax them open again.
However, like many other plants with attractive flowers, when onion grass is taken from its natural environment and grown in a foreign place, the checks and balances in its indigenous ecosystem that maintain harmony and prevent it getting out of control are no longer present. If the alien environmental conditions favour growth that is unchecked by an unfamiliar ecosystem, the usual response is to blame the plant for getting out of control and becoming what we’ve termed a ‘weed’ rather than the perpetrators taking responsibility for having created the problem by growing it in the wrong place. It seems that we as humans have not yet learnt from this mistake that has been repeated time and time again across the globe in the hundreds of years since explorers began removing plants from their native habitat to grow in their home countries.
People are like plants in so many ways. We all have environmental conditions that bring out the best is us, the person we naturally are at our core, in our centre. We know in our heart what these conditions are that make us shine, imbue us with energy, exuberance and seemingly endless enthusiasm for life. They are facilitated by doing what we love and being among people who support us being our true selves whilst at the same time willing to tell us when we are straying from our path.
Yet there are times when we make major life choices, like pursuing a new friendship, job or living situation, where we inadvertently allow our decisions to be influenced by others, the excitement of something new and unknown or even our own sense of what we feel we should or shouldn’t do based on the belief system we have created for ourselves. It’s easy to get drawn into the energy and excitement of the new, unable to resist being pulled along by the momentum it creates, and before long we can find ourselves doing things that we don’t feel particularly good about that are not in alignment with our heart. Without the influence of the checks and balances provided by our own inner compass and those who remind us to stay true to ourselves, our lives have veered out of control and we’ve become like a ‘weed’: A person growing in the wrong place!
It’s so much easier to blame the friend or the job or the living situation for the predicament we find ourselves in rather than take responsibility for it ourselves. However, the good news is that unlike plants that have been placed in a new environment and become a problem, we can rectify our own life situation by learning from our experience and making the choices required to change it to one where the beauty of our soul shines through and we are in the company of those who know and support our true self.