I’ve been having a lot of vertigo lately. Luckily, it’s been fairly mild, but there’s something deeply unsettling about feeling dizzy and foggy.

I’ve also been feeling like I have mental and spiritual vertigo as well.

It isn’t just the physical disorientation of not knowing which drawer holds the spoons or where all my underwear ended up; it’s the spiritual thinning that happens when everything you own is taped shut and stacked in a corner. I have spent the last few weeks in a special kind of moving hell, transitioning from the predictable rhythms of a very quiet suburban neighborhood to the slightly louder pulse of downtown living.

Everything is different.

The light hits the floor at a different angle. The sounds of the street are unfamiliar. I am surrounded by half-assembled furniture and a sea of boxes that seem to multiply whenever I turn my back.

I am dizzy all the time.

I am unmoored.

But the disorientation inside my four walls is nothing compared to the weight of the world outside them.

As I struggle to find my coffee mugs and phone chargers, I am haunted and burdened by the news. There is a war in Iran, and the rhetoric coming from the jackass in the White House is chilling. Hearing a leader threaten that “a whole civilization will die tonight” is a level of dehumanization that feels like a rupture in the fabric of our shared humanity.

It creates a jarring, almost nauseating cognitive dissonance.

How do I go about the business of unpacking books and setting up a house like we’re not on the brink of world war 3? How do I focus on going to work, or the glamorous task of trying to convince my dog that crapping in the new backyard is not the end of the world when the very existence of millions of people is being spoken of like they’re just…disposable?

I look at my new neighbors—the two lovely Nigerian families who share the apartment building with me—and I feel a lump in my throat.

How do I look them in the eye if we, as a nation, agree to just look away from this kind of rhetoric again?

I always say that I consider myself a HUUM [a humanist, unitarian universalist mystic], that means I believe in the deep, inherent worth of every person and the sacred threads that connect us all. When those threads are threatened with fire, the act of buying a new coffee table feels absurd, if not downright complicit.

Yet, in the middle of this chaos and heartbreak, there is a tiny, stubborn teacher sitting on my new kitchen windowsill.

She is an ungovernable amaryllis bulb.

You know the type—the ones dipped in thick wax, sold with a glossy tag promising a festive Christmas bloom.

This one, however, had other plans.

She sat on my old windowsill for months, doing absolutely nothing. A tiny, one-inch nub of green was her only contribution to the decor, a quiet but firm middle finger to her botanical schedule. I had essentially forgotten she existed.

Then came March 20.

That was the day I found out I had secured my new apartment and had to kick my life into high gear.

I woke up that morning to find that the amaryllis had sprouted a six-inch stalk almost overnight.

As my life began to disappear into boxes and the stress of the move ramped up, that stalk kept climbing. While I was taping up the kitchen, a big, fat flower bud appeared at the end of the green tower.

On moving day, April 1, as a small army of my friends were hauling my life into the backs of their pickups and minivans, I took a moment to look at her. The bud had started to split. Just a tiny hint of red was peeking through the green casing, like a secret being whispered.

Now, she sits in my new kitchen.

Every day, as I unpack another box of books or try to figure out which coax port will power the wifi gateway , she gets a little closer to her reveal.

I can see now that there aren’t just one or two flowers coming; there are three. Three bright, defiant red blooms are working on unfolding themselves right as I am trying to unfold my new life.

I can’t help but think that this amaryllis knew something I didn’t.

She refused to bloom when the box told her to.

She refused to perform for a holiday that had already passed.

Instead, she waited.

She waited for the moment when everything would be in flux, when I would feel most lost and most overwhelmed by the cruelty of the world. She waited until the very moment I needed a reminder that life persists, even when it’s inconvenient, and even when the timing seems all wrong.

Blooming in one’s own time is a lesson in itself. It’s a quiet act of resistance against a world that demands we be “on” or “ready” or “settled” according to someone else’s clock. The world feels dark right now, and the rhetoric of death is loud. But there is something incredibly powerful about a bulb that refuses to be governed by anything other than its own internal rhythm.

I am still unmoored.

I still have three pieces of furniture to put together and a zillion totes to unpack, and I still don’t know how to reconcile the beauty of a new home with the ugliness of global conflict.

But I am watching the red peek through.

I am learning to breathe in the space between the boxes.

And I am trying to trust that, like the amaryllis, we will find our way to bloom, even if we’re a little late to the party.