The Wrong Vegetable
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Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”
You know how we all have those sayings we’ve heard so many times that we never really stop to question them? We’ve compared life to onions, roads, rivers, mountains… the list goes on. They become part of our language, and after a while we just accept them without ever asking ourselves whether they actually describe our own experience.
Onions were a staple on our table growing up, so I understand why people use that comparison. An onion asks us to peel away one layer after another until we finally reach the center. Peeling an onion is a sensory experience. You feel the layers, your eyes begin to water, and eventually you reach the center. It’s a beautiful image, but it’s also a very linear one. Come to think of it, most of the metaphors we’ve chosen for life are linear. They suggest one path, one direction, one next step.
Life certainly has its moments, but I don’t think it’s meant to leave us crying every time we look a little deeper. Sometimes looking a little deeper brings an unexpected surprise.
But I digress.
Years ago I planted artichokes in my garden. I’d eaten them my whole life, but I’d never grown them before. When it came time to harvest them, I left a couple on the plant simply because I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen.
A few weeks later I walked into the garden and stopped.
The artichokes had opened into these magnificent purple flowers.
I remember standing there staring at them, wondering how I could have eaten artichokes my entire life without realizing that what I’d been eating wasn’t the finished plant at all. It was a flower before it bloomed.
That discovery delighted me. Not because I had learned a gardening fact, but because it reminded me how easy it is to believe we know something simply because it’s familiar. Sometimes all it takes is seeing the very same thing from a different perspective to realize there was far more there than we ever noticed.
A few days later I picked up another artichoke, not because I was hungry, but because I was still thinking about it. I turned it over in my hands and really looked at it for what felt like the first time.
That’s when I noticed something I had somehow missed all those years.
The petals don’t simply sit one on top of another the way the layers of an onion do. They overlap. One petal reaches across two or sometimes three petals beneath it. So when you gently pull back one petal, it doesn’t simply reveal the next one.
It reveals several.
Several petals.
Several possibilities.
Several choices.
And suddenly I found myself smiling.
Maybe we’ve been using the wrong vegetable all along.
Because that’s exactly how life has always felt to me.
When one experience opens up, it rarely leads to only one next experience. It reveals several perspectives. Several possibilities. Several directions I could move. Some petals come away easily. Others ask a little more of us. Some are obvious. Others require a little patience. But life doesn’t choose the next petal for us.
We do.
That’s what choice is.
That’s why life has never felt like an onion.
Life has always felt much more like an artichoke.
Every experience overlaps with others. Every conversation touches something else. Every perspective reveals another possibility that was already there, waiting to be noticed. We aren’t limited to one way of seeing, and because we’re not limited to one way of seeing, we’re not limited to one way of moving.
That’s what I love most about the artichoke.
Its petals don’t force us down a single path.
They simply reveal that there has almost always been another one.
And every petal we gently explore brings us a little closer to the heart.
I love that the center of an artichoke is called the heart. Unlike the onion, whose center eventually disappears, the artichoke has one. A real heart. Something nourishing. Something worth taking your time to reach.
But even that isn’t the end.
If you stop at the heart, you’ve only seen part of the story.
Leave the artichoke on the plant, and the heart opens into one of the most extraordinary purple flowers you’ll ever see.
I love that.
It reminds me that the heart isn’t an ending.
It’s the place where something beautiful continues to expand and be discovered.
Maybe that’s true of us as well.
Maybe life isn’t asking us to peel ourselves down until there’s nothing left. Maybe it’s inviting us to gently uncover one perspective after another, discovering that every petal reveals more than one possibility, every possibility offers another choice, and every choice becomes another opportunity to move toward the heart of our own lived experience.
So if someone asked me today what life is like, I wouldn’t say it’s an onion.
I’d hand them an artichoke.
Then I’d ask them to look very closely at the petals.
Because I think the artichoke has been quietly teaching us about life all along.
© Original work by Rev. Tina M. Adkins