I felt like a failure sitting outside the building, waiting to clock into my job as a second shift janitor. I was settling into the new work routine, but mentally it was still discouraging.

To look at my resume, I’d tumbled down a flight of stairs—every job lower than the last. It wasn’t really like that. In the eyes of the world, the positions didn’t look impressive, but each job had been meaningful and important to me.

Except this one. 

Scrubbing toilets wasn’t where I wanted to be in life. I dreamed of growing dahlias, and I’d been inching slowly in that direction. I wanted to turn the large empty lot behind our house into an urban flower farm for selling plants, tubers, and cut flowers to florists, small businesses, and individual buyers. I wanted to surrounded myself with beauty and share it with others. 

But this was no longer the time for beautiful dreams or taking chances. My husband and I had done that, flown for a while, and ultimately crashed. Now was the time to play it safe again, work the dependable jobs, pay off the debts. We needed to get back on track. There would be time for dreams again later. 

Now wasn’t the time to think of flowers.

Even so, my eyes were drawn to the yellow chamomile flowering joyfully beside the wrought iron bench where I sat. As I scanned the branching plant, a single flower quickly caught my attention. Its stem was severely bent—almost broken—and the small flower at its furthest most point was hanging upside down.

My stomach tightened. The flower looked the way I felt. 

Silently absorbing the rush of sadness that washed over me, I sat for a few moments looking from a distance at the damaged stem. Then I stood up and moved closer. The wildflower seemed perfect except for its orientation—exactly opposite of what it ought to be. The small yellow face was pointing toward the ground instead of the sky. I straighten the stem, but when I let go, the flower collapsed back into its previous position.

The day suddenly seemed heavier. 

Touching the petals as I turned to go, I noticed an elastic hair band around my wrist. Of course! I scanned the ground and picked up a small twig, then built a makeshift brace around the damaged stem. The contraption seemed light enough that it wouldn’t weigh down the stem, but strong enough to strengthen the wounded area.

At least it was something.

While vacuuming and cleaning that evening I wondered about the flower. How was she? I’d done my best to give her a chance—I should be satisfied with that—but I wasn’t. Deep down I wanted the flower to survive. I needed her to live. 

When I visited the next day, I was amazed to find the bloom looking healthy and strong. Actually, apart from the odd apparatus bundled beneath her, the tiny blossom looked perfect. 

As I sat down beside her the flower seemed to whisper, “Just because you’re damaged doesn’t mean you’re out of commission. Even when you feel like you’re dangling upside down, there is still hope. Always. Remember that.”

And something inside me silently replied. “You’re right. And you don’t need perfect conditions to do what you are called to do.” My official job during this time wasn’t gardening…and yet, this little plant and I had found each other. In the moments before my shift began, I’d found a way to care for the broken yellow chamomile blossom. 

Both thoughts left me pensive, and encouraged. My work situation wasn’t my ideal, but what could I do to brace myself up, give the broken flower of my dreams a chance to thrive again? Yes, I’d come up against road blocks, but that didn’t mean the path was closed forever. There was still hope.

I made a decision. Instead of letting the failures pull me down, I needed to let dreams and plans lift my thoughts as I worked. As I mopped floors, I listened to podcasts about flower farming. While scrubbing toilets, I imagined my future garden plots. Whenever I could, I scrimped and tucked extra money aside to rebuild my dream. I tried to see the extra long daily stretches on the job as an opportunity instead of a burden.

And in the few rushed hours I had every day at home, I made time to care for my dahlia patch. Often, I even checked on the plants when I arrived back at 1 a.m. To keep my dream alive another year, I needed a good crop of tubers for planting in the spring. With dahlias, a single bad year can sink even an established grower. If I could maintain my current crop, that would mean a foundation to stand on in future years. 

I often thought about the yellow chamomile bloom, and went back to visit her. Even among the identical flowers, she was easy to find. Her stem had healed and didn’t need the support system anymore, but I didn’t want to risk damage by trying to remove it. 

But over time, the cheery yellow flower showed signs of aging. One day, she had disappeared, completing her transformation into a seed head. 

At first the shriveled blossom felt like a loss: My flower friend was gone. Then, once again, the departing flower worked her magic, and infused me with her ever abundant gift of hope. 

The flower was gone, yes, but her seeds were still alive. That thought brought me joy. The small kernels of life tucked into the shell of her shriveled body were simply on pause. They were waiting for the right time and conditions to arrive, but they held all the potential of their mother flower, and a thousand times more. “Your dreams are in seed form now,” my flower friend seemed to say with her last breath. “They haven’t come to an end.”

I tore a page from my notebook, folded a makeshift envelope, and collected the seeds. Then I penned a note on top of the packet and set the seeds on my desk and left them there as a reminder.

Over the course of next few months, many things changed. Thanks to hard work, long hours, and a couple miraculous interventions, my husband and I managed to put things in order without losing focus on either of our creative dreams. And this year, I’ve been given a full-fledged chance to grow flowers.

My heart is overflowing. The seeds have been purchased, the garden plans have been drawn up, the sales connections are being made, the dahlia tubers are ready to be woken up, the greenhouse is ready, the ground is being amended to meet the soil tests. In big ways and small, things are coming together. The dream is appearing, materializing out of the mist.

And I can’t help thinking, as I did so many time last year, about the yellow chamomile bloom and the envelope of her tiny seeds, now tucked away, waiting for spring.

Will they grow? I don’t know. The future, as life constantly reminds me, is uncertain. But of the many things that broken flower gave me last year, the largest gift was hope. And so I’m hoping. 

I’m hoping, as I look out the window at the snow still scattered in spots on the ground, that the seeds will flourish this spring. I’m hoping that every time I see that second generation of cheerful yellow chamomile blossoms, it will remind me of the way their inspirational mother lived. I’m hoping the daughter plants and their offspring will bloom abundantly over the course of this year—and far into the future. 

And woven into that hope is a special prayer, that maybe, just maybe, my own flower dreams will also take root, flourish, and bloom with resilience through the good times and the bad, following, one last time, the lead of my wildflower friend.