Allowed to Lean
On agave, expectation, and unmanicured grace
There are moments when travel slows you down just enough to notice what you might otherwise walk past. Something catches your eye, not because it’s neat or impressive, but because it doesn’t quite make sense.
That’s what happened with these plants that I thought were trees. It wasn’t the church tower nearby or the setting as a whole. It was their height and shape. The way they were growing in different directions, leaning and angling away from one another, as if each had made its own decision about where to reach. I found them beautiful and mesmerising, but also puzzling. They didn’t line up. They didn’t conform. I couldn’t immediately explain what I was looking at, and that curiosity sent me off to find out more.
They are agaves — plants that spend years gathering strength almost invisibly. Season after season of storing, waiting. And then, once in a lifetime, they send up a tall flowering stem. Not straight. Not symmetrical. Each one grows in its own direction, shaped by wind, by weather, by the light it happens to receive.
In other parts of the world, this same plant is managed very differently. It’s watched closely. Its growth is redirected. Flowering is prevented so that sweetness can be extracted and sold. Money is made from what the plant produces, from how efficiently it can be harvested.
Here, on the Maltese coast, no one intervenes.
These agaves aren’t monitored or corrected or optimised. They lean. They respond to wind and light and scarcity. They grow in ways that look inefficient, untidy, even a little awkward. The flowering stalk isn’t sweet. It isn’t useful. It isn’t harvestable.
It is expressive, not productive.
And as I stood there looking at them, a quieter thought began to form, not as a grand metaphor, but as a personal reckoning.
How much of my own life is shaped by expectation? How often do I straighten myself, align myself, tidy myself up, not because it’s true, but because it’s what seems to be required? How easily worth becomes tangled up with output, with usefulness, with the appearance of having it all together.
There is something deeply freeing about these plants being allowed to grow as they are. About not having to be perfectly aligned. About angles and bends and different orientations being not just acceptable, but beautiful.
I’m reminded of a friend whose garden I adore, generous, alive, never overly tidy. She used to laugh at my fondness for straight edges and clean lines. But growth doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t grow to rulers and right angles. It spills. It leans. It responds to weather, to light, to what’s available.
Standing there, I found myself wanting to offer myself the same permission. To be less manicured. To stop measuring my worth by what I produce or how neatly I line up. To trust that bends and shifts and changes of direction aren’t signs of failure, but part of how real growth happens.
These agaves aren’t straight.
They don’t match.
They aren’t optimised.
And yet, they are unmistakably themselves.
Perhaps there is a kind of grace in that, an unmanicured grace.
The freedom to grow at an angle.
To lean without apology.
To be shaped by what we’ve lived through, rather than by what we think we should look like.