What the Lotus Knows

People sometimes ask why the lotus. Why name a book series, and half an imprint, after one particular flower. The honest answer is that the lotus knows something I spent most of my life learning the hard way, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I sat down to write.

The lotus does not grow in clear water. It grows in mud. It roots itself in the murk at the bottom of a pond, in exactly the kind of place we are taught to be ashamed of, and it uses that muck as food. Then it rises, slowly, through the dark water, and it opens on the surface as something clean and improbably beautiful, without a trace of where it came from clinging to its petals.

For years I believed the mud was the problem. The losses, the wrong turns, the seasons I would have edited out of my life if I could. I thought the goal was to rise above all of it, to arrive somewhere clean and leave the murk behind, and to be quietly embarrassed that it had ever been part of me at all.

The lotus taught me otherwise. It does not rise in spite of the mud. It rises because of it. The very thing I wanted to disown was the thing feeding the bloom. Every reinvention I have ever managed was rooted in something that first fell apart. Every page worth writing came out of a season I would not have chosen.

That is the promise underneath this whole imprint, and it is not a tidy one. I am not going to tell you that everything happens for a reason, because I do not believe grief works on a schedule of neat meaning. What I believe is quieter and, I think, truer. The hard ground is not wasted. It is where the roots go. Whatever you are standing in right now, thick and dark and impossible to see through, is not the end of your story. It may turn out to be the beginning of the bloom.

So welcome to Sage Lotus Press. This is where I write about starting over, about loss and reinvention and the long slow work of becoming, without pretending any of it was clean. Pull up a chair. The water here has some mud in it, and that is exactly the point.