Up From the Mud: Lessons From the Lotus
A visit to a local sustainable lotus farm, plus the miraculous tale of a lost shoe and a rainy day in the Cambodian countryside.
This piece was written last September during my first week in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m also currently staying at an almost entirely off-grid farm in Guatemala, so if it takes me a while to respond to your comments or if I seem a little less active on here, that’s why!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
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After days of wandering through the tree-strewn temples of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, I found myself taking the entire day to just sit and write in one of Siem Reap’s many charming cafes. But after a morning of writing, and despite warnings of a coming storm, I decided to take a more unique excursion that took me outside of the city proper and into the countryside.
Rain threatened and the roads were already slick with mud when my tuk-tuk driver dropped me off at the Lotus Farm. I passed through an ornate gate and approached a small white house. Outside, women sat around on stools, spreading fine threads on black tables and soaking long green stems in vats of clear water.
I was quickly ushered up to the top floor of the house, where I was served a pot of lotus tea, which is oolong tea steeped inside a lotus flower for three days. The brew had a slight kick and a gentle sweetness. After I finished the tea, a sweet young woman began guiding myself and a few other tourists through the premises, explaining how the Lotus Farm employs local women and focuses on sustainability.
Step by step, she took us through the daily rhythm of lotus harvesting. First, farmers wake up early in the morning and harvest lotuses from their land, and then the lotuses are brought to the farm, where they are cleaned carefully in order to remove the sharp edges from their stems.
We made our way to a corner where a woman was deftly cutting open lotus stems. When sliced, they revealed long strands of sinewy fibers that slipped out like spiderweb tendrils and trailed from her fingers. A single stem’s fibers compounded together form surprisingly hard and versatile thread, which is then used to create sustainable fabrics, leathers, and all manner of products.
The woman draped the fibers over a moist wooden bench, then twined and packaged them together with her fingers. She paid us no mind as she worked, and I felt faintly glad to see that the employees didn’t feel like they needed to pander to curious tourists.
Our guide then showed us how the lotus’s petals open and close each day by themselves. Errant bees, she said, sometimes find themselves stuck inside the petals after they close. But if this happens, the bee simply enjoys a beautiful night’s rest inside of the lotus flower — and perhaps a dance on the pockmarked yellow pistil, one of the other attendees remarked, and we all acknowledged that the lotus’s insides would indeed make a perfect bee-sized dance floor.
Our guide continued to amaze us with lotus-related facts. Lotus fibers, she said, contain tiny bits of wax which help them stick together. Eventually, the petals drop off, and the pistils turn from yellow to green and become burdened with fat, heavy seeds. She also explained that lotuses supposedly have myriad health benefits, from helping with insomnia to fighting against fungi and various infections.
She then plucked a few green seeds from a mature lotus bloom and handed them to us, motioning for us to eat them. They tasted a bit strange at first, but were ultimately sweet and refreshing, and I soon wanted more.
After a while, she explained, the green pistil turns brown and hard and pockmarked as it nears the end of its life cycle. At this point, the seeds also turn tough and black — and these very seeds are used to create mooncakes in China.
I quickly found myself in awe of the lotus’s ability to transform itself many times throughout its existence. Like much else in nature, its seeds are coded with the innate ability to know when and how to grow and when and how to metamorphose. It grows up from the mud and water with its stems all filled with wispy fibers and its petals stained a perfect pink-and-white pattern.
All natural things share a knowledge of when to grow and when to transform. As humans are not separate from nature, we also possess this knowledge. It is written into our bodies, our cycles, and the pull of our emotions and instincts.
Lotus fibers can also be turned into everything from leather to paper. In sustainable ecosystems, like nature or the lotus farm, nothing is wasted; everything can be transformed and resurrected.
Lotuses had been been omnipresent since I arrived in Cambodia, hanging outside of tuk-tuks and smiling in my hotel rooms, their petals bound up and pointing towards the brilliant afternoon sun. This flower has deep and profound spiritual significance, and it’s easy to see why.
The lotus grows up from the mud, blossoming out of the muck into something strong and resilient. These flowers remind us that things that appear to be ugly can actually be nourishing.
And they remind us that we can be reborn. We can rise up from below. Our worst times and greatest confusions can generate new possibilities we never could have imagined.
These blooms have different spiritual meanings in each culture, but they generally represent rebirth, enlightenment, transcendence, overcoming adversity, and purity. They are often presented to the Buddha for good luck, and Indian deities are also often portrayed carrying lotuses.
Life can be so full of suffering, but I have been so inspired by the resilience of so many of the people I’ve known in my life, including the Cambodians I met on this trip, who experienced adversity and inherited trauma I cannot understand and yet still all smile so radiantly whenever you meet their eyes.
I also know in my own life, my greatest struggles have almost always catalyzed my greatest, most life-changing growth. This is a simple, overtaught lesson, this, but it is a timeless one. From the dark, dirty waters, radiant flowers can grow, and they can be woven into resilient material and new life. And whatever is left behind will turn back into the dirt that will again support new seeds and new blooms.
This is the cycle and circle of life, written into everything we see, into the rising and falling sun, into the shift and warp of emotion, into the changing seasons, into life and death, and into the opening and unfolding and dying and sinking and rebirth of the lotus itself.
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Enamored with the plant, I decided to take a boat ride out into the lotus fields. The clouds were looking thicker than ever, but my fellow travelers and I decided to risk it. Two of them were also in the midst of year-long solo travel stints, and I saw myself in their grins as we all looked at the sky and decided we were more than ready to get soaked if necessary.
Those who really love to travel know that to enjoy the ride, you have to really be open to anything. And I was about to learn that lesson again, albeit in a way I never could have imagined.
It began to pour as we set out in our boats, weaving our way through houses on stilts that housed waving and beaming children and little yellow chicks that chirped among hordes of feathers and feed.
I slipped off my shoes and took deep breaths the cool, damp air. My mundane questions about my traveling companion’s past destinations faded away as I slipped firmly into that elusive territory of the all-encompassing present.
Why, I thought, would I want to be somewhere else or talk about some other time when I was here, and everything was so green and so wet and so perfectly wild?
We soon left civilization behind and entered the kingdom of the lotus. The water around us was thick with heavy lily pads, punctuated occasionally by regal lotuses that soared above the webs of green fronds like pink fireworks, radiant and poised, their petals already closing up for the night.
It rained harder, but our boat captain was hard at work, looping lotuses into a beautiful bouquet and necklace which he gifted to me. I gave one of my flowers to my traveling companion, a man, for I am of the humble belief that men also deserve — and enjoy — flowers as much as women. He indeed seemed very happy to have it, and warmed to me considerably, I felt, after that.
The atmosphere took on a dreamlike quality. My skirt became soaked with rain, and everything smelled damp and floral, and I forgot myself.
I suppose I really did forget myself because when we arrived at the shore, my right shoe was gone.
We all looked around the boat as the rain clattered down on us, but it really was nowhere to be found. I wouldn’t have cared so much about a shoe normally, but this shoe was special. This shoe, specifically Vionic’s Colleen Sandal Size 7.5, means a lot to me.
After my knee surgery delayed my travels by 1.5 years and left me unable to walk without crutches or a cane for eight months, I had came to rely on these sandals, as for a time they were the only shoes that didn’t hurt my knee. But after they fell apart (I don’t blame the brand — I walked miles and miles in all manner of conditions in those things), I was shocked to find that they’d been discontinued and spent hours searching for an available model online. Somehow, right before I left for this trip, a pair in my size miraculously popped up on a resale site. I suppose in my mind, these sandals had sort of come to symbolize my ability to walk and travel at all, which I do not take for granted for a single moment.
Now it appeared that the lotuses had claimed the shoe. This was not a bad resting place for a worthy and beloved piece of footwear, I supposed. But still. I told the guide to let me know if they happened to find it, and expected to never see it again.
A few minutes into our ride home, our tuk-tuk stopped and a shirtless man bicycled up to me, brandishing the shoe. I handed him the fake Balenciaga sandals I’d borrowed from the boat captain, and somehow, just like that, my Vionics — shoes that would undoubtedly horrify Carrie Bradshaw but which are my single most prized and beloved pieces of clothing on Earth — were in my possession again.
For a long time after my knee surgery, I had not been able to walk. I wasn’t able to squelch through the mud, wasn’t able to step outside and feel the rain on my skin.
When you can’t walk, your whole life changes. Everything becomes condensed down to the space between the couch and the fridge, the bed and the bathroom. I tried to handle the whole thing with grace, but in hindsight, I really withdrew from the world. I didn’t have many friends for a while, because I just didn’t have the energy to go out and hobble around and risk injuring my knee further. For a time, I started to feel like no one.
When you spend months having to carefully wheel your food and drinks on a rolling platform because you can’t walk without crutches because apparently it’ll make your botched knee surgery even more botched, you really never take walking freely for granted again.
But, after months of physical therapy and acupuncture and spiritual healing and doctors’ appointments that went nowhere and promises that I’d be better in a few months that were always broken, the knee slowly but surely healed. Now I have no pain, which I honestly feel is a miracle, because later MRIs revealed that the knee is still damaged. The meniscus was basically torn beyond repair.
From the images, it has the consistency of a lotus pistil in its later stages, or a piece of Swiss cheese. A therapist told me it looked like my knee had been crushed. I still have no idea how I even injured it in the first place.
Yet today I can walk again.
There will be times when I sink back down into the mud. But I know I’ve come out before, and I will again. And plus, the mud has its nourishing side as well. It has its own version of cool, peaceful medicine.
Sometimes, sinking deep into rest and shadow can be a vital part of life. It is important to take time away from the world, to hibernate and incubate so one can be reborn, if only because it shows us how resilient we truly are and if only because it pushes us to go deeper, to learn more, and to come out changed.
Injury, I have come to think, is merely the body protecting itself the best way it knows how. And pain is the body’s alarm, a sign that something is too much. That more support is needed. That it is necessary to sink into rest and networks of support, and to seek out medicine there.
All that might explain why I definitely felt a surprising swell of emotion when my shoe appeared again. Of course, losing a shoe is not a very big deal in the scheme of things and I felt a bit silly as we arrived back at the farm. The whole ordeal was so absurd I couldn’t help but laugh.
Apparently and bizarrely, they’d discovered the shoe floating under the boat, and I still have no idea how that happened. Now, I joked, my shoe was infused with the lotus’s cleansing powers.
The waters in which the lotuses grow are apparently some of the cleanest in Cambodia, our guide told us, because of the lotus’s purifying properties. She also told us that during the pandemic, a lab in South Korea had found that lotuses could potentially cure COVID-19.
I believe that science and nature and spirituality function best when they all work together. While I wouldn’t make the argument that lotuses can definitely cure COVID, I think it certainly might be possible, and I think we really should be using herbs and plants more in modern medicine.
I also believe being in nature and connecting with the earth is one of the greatest medicines of all. Our souls need to love the earth. And the earth needs us to love it — at least so we stop killing it, and by proxy, stop killing ourselves.
We are all connected, existing in a web of perpetual reciprocity. When we all work together and use every part and discard nothing and value everything, we all bloom.
Splotching back into my hotel in my rain-soaked skirt, clutching my bouquet of lotuses and hobbling on a shoe now soaked with lotus-saturated water and caked in muck, I was grateful I didn’t just stay inside writing all day. Because my writing is best when I am also living. When I am being part of a greater ecosystem. Breathing in the damp air. Riding through the pouring rain as the sun sets, toes muddy, insides full of flowers and fresh air.
And then, of course, going home and writing about it all.
