A few days ago, during a lull in my lab experiments, I took the elevator up two floors to see one of Dartmouth’s corpse flowers, “Morphy,” which finally bloomed. Posters advertising the event had been multiplying in the hallways, taped crookedly between notices about seminars and safety trainings until they began to feel less like announcements and more like a quiet insistence that something was happening just above me that I was supposed to notice. I had been moving through the building on autopilot for weeks, but this was a nice change of pace.
When I got to the greenhouse, it was already packed. People stood around it in loose clusters, shifting to get better views. There was a shared understanding that you were supposed to keep adjusting your position until it made sense, until everyone around you could glimpse the wonder that was this plant. The earthy smell was noticeable immediately, but less dramatic than I expected. It mostly just made the room feel slightly off, like something too large had been placed somewhere it wasn’t meant to fit. Amorphophallus titanum, advertised little signs stuck in the dirt.
I had seen this plant about six months earlier, during my sophomore summer, with my mom when she came to visit me. It wasn’t blooming then. That summer was also the first time I ever stepped into the Life Sciences Center greenhouse at all, even though I had spent years working just two floors below it, never once thinking to look up and wonder what else was there. It was like discovering that the building I thought I knew had been holding a second climate the entire time.
My mom notices plants in a way I don’t. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with her in her garden, though I rarely participated in any way that mattered to the garden itself. I was there for proximity more than involvement — reading in a folding chair that slowly tilted into the grass, or trailing behind her without offering help, or simply occupying the same sunlight while she moved around, speaking a language I did not yet understand. She would stop without announcement, bend slightly and register something I would have walked past a hundred times without seeing. A leaf curling differently. A stem leaning too far. A shift in color so slight it barely qualified as change.
Only later did I realize that what she was doing was not just noticing, but tracking, a continuous attention to life as it unfolds unevenly, refusing to remain static. She always seemed to know what was happening before it became visible in any obvious way — what was growing, what was struggling, what was continuing anyway.
When I went up to see Morphy this time, I had my mom on FaceTime. I held my phone above people’s shoulders so she could see, moving slightly through the crowd to find better angles like I was trying to make the scene legible for her in real time. The greenhouse became something layered: what I saw, what she saw, what I thought I saw because she was describing it back to me. The boundaries between those versions kept dissolving. I wasn’t fully taking in the plant myself because I was too focused on whether she was. My mom reacted immediately, pointing out details I hadn’t registered yet and asking questions I didn’t have answers to. Without her, I think I would have just seen a large plant in a crowded room. With her, I kept looking longer, even when I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be noticing.
At one point, I waved at the livestream camera in the greenhouse because I knew she could see me from that angle too. It was slightly ridiculous, but a funny way to acknowledge multiple layers of observation at once.
After I hung up, I lingered in the greenhouse for a while longer. People were still taking photos, stepping forward and back again because of the smell, then lingering anyway. No one really needed to be there for too long. I didn’t either. I had gone because it was happening, and that had felt like enough logic at the time.
I think what kept everyone there wasn’t really the flower itself. It was the strange feeling of being pulled into a shared moment, however temporary or insignificant. The room had the atmosphere of collective attention: strangers orienting themselves toward the same thing, reacting to it together, waiting for something they couldn’t quite name. The bloom mattered, but so did the fact that other people had come to witness it, too.
My attention often works this way. A few days earlier, I was sitting at the main room table in my house pretending to do homework. I usually do get work done there, but that’s not the purpose. I can go anywhere to do work, and there are a number of places that would be more conducive to productivity. What I really like is the feeling of everyone gathering around the same space without needing a reason beyond proximity. We’re all doing different things, but the room rarely stays quiet long enough to remain a study space. Someone laughs at something on their laptop, someone cooks in the background, someone asks a question that turns into a conversation none of us had planned to have. I stay seated, but the shape of what I’m doing keeps changing because everyone else is there too.
The conversations themselves are usually forgettable. Half the time, I couldn’t tell you what we were talking about an hour later. But I remember the feeling of being folded into other people’s attention, of existing briefly inside a shared rhythm instead of entirely inside my own head.
Even smaller moments seem to follow the same logic in hindsight. I was sitting at the Top of the Hop recently when a family with a very small baby sat nearby. The baby looked around with steady, almost-investigative seriousness, as if everything she saw had equal weight and deserved equal attention. At some point she turned toward me and my friends, and we all waved without coordinating it, as if the gesture had already been decided somewhere outside of us.
She waved back immediately, without hesitation, as though this exchange was not new but simply expected. It struck me, oddly, how natural it seemed to her that attention would move both ways like that. I remember thinking that I must have done the same once, when I was a baby, and that I cannot pinpoint when I stopped believing the world would always respond so directly when I reached toward it.
Most of these moments aren’t especially dramatic or structured or memorable. They pass quietly, almost beneath notice. But later, they return to me with surprising clarity, far more vividly than most of the things I was deliberately trying to focus on at the time. I’m remembering them now, writing them down, so they must have meaning.
I think that’s because none of them are experiences I arrive at alone. They become meaningful through other people’s presence, through the subtle ways attention expands when it’s shared. And maybe that’s why they stay with me afterward: not because the moments themselves were extraordinary, but because, for a little while, they made me feel less separate from the world moving around me.
Aditi Gupta ’27 is a Mirror editor from Ridgefield, Conn. She is majoring in Biology with minors in Global Health and English. On campus, she spends most of her time working in a cell biology lab. She hopes to pursue a career that integrates her love for scientific research with her broader academic interests in health and literature.
