In defense of weeds

Who grows wild outside the borders of your known?

Welcome to my deeper dive into everything Unfixed! It might get muddy, thorny, itchy or ripe but you won’t need band-aids or galoshes, just an open mind and a willingness to peer on the other side of your preconceptions. In this new series titled “In Defense of…” I delve into a quality, experience or object often rejected, misunderstood or discounted in our culture. Think: Monotony, Mondays, Weeds, Wrinkles and Porridge. Ten years ago I never thought I’d be making a case for living in an unfixed body and exalting its virtues. So it got me thinking, What else have we been conditioned to reject? What unassuming beauty or opportunity awaits us when biases are examined and we embrace a life holistic? I invite you to join my horizontal playground where duality commingles without hierarchy or preference, recovering the parts of ourselves, our lives and the earth longing to be part of the conversation.

All the p’s (prose, poetry and photography) are by yours truly. 🤍

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When the world says no, a dandelion sings yes;

when the world questions, a thistle takes a guess.

Crabgrass knows value without showing off;

chicory asserts with delicate quaff.

Weeds are as green as your emerald-eyed lover 

but never does abandon, the white tipped clover. 

Oregon’s regal Daucus Carota and her dominion of firs

I write about weeds today while a rosy affliction polka-dots my hands. Springtime swishes away the tail of Oregon’s winter with frenzy, assaulting my flesh with rash change, my skin more verb than noun. If I had microscopic vision, I would see the boundary of me eating the stardust of other—fescue and rye grass, maple and ash pollen, moss and mildew and wolf lichen spores—reminding self of its endless undoing.

But I weed anyway in a never-ending attempt to impose my ideals of beauty. I choose order over chaos. Choice over none. Control over the inevitable. My compulsive brain dope-lusts for tetris shapes falling into place, a hanging picture frame finding her family of lines. With bare hands I pull aberrant green tongues from my veggie beds, call them weeds, and laugh at my absurd distinction. What are weeds anyway but a manmade line drawn in the soil? Nature doesn’t differentiate. As Thomas Berry once said, “Without the perfection of each part, something is lacking from the whole.”

I wonder, Who grows wild outside the borders of your known?

Zooming into my inner garden, the same attempt for authority applies. Weed out pain. Remove angst. Torch rage. While I’d never spray Round Up on this gorgeous earth, I’ve certainly spent years killing the many-leafed shades of life within. Feeling lonely—too gaping. Grieving dad’s sudden death—too overwhelming. Hiding in the upstairs bathroom as a teenager, bound by every blemish and my compulsion to eradicate, I weeded imperfections; even more painful the hiding—a deliberate denial of my value and existence. The necessity of my vulnerability frightened me, how its tender hand reached toward possibility and a more complete and thriving ecosystem of self and other. Uncertainty ached so instead I deprived, smothered or uprooted the unruly, the unwanted.

Even today (with the last decade’s soft-earned surrender now a thankful grace) I swallowed a handful of brain supplements over breakfast—a biochemical weed cloth to slow my brain’s natural aging or hereditary decline. As long as we’re alive with agency, humans will forever have preferences, make choices, envision this not that, and assert temporary order within atemporal chaos. I’m not here to argue freewill and invention; I only want to laud and applaud that which is too often booed.

So as an exercise, imagine with me a sacred garden for weeds—a place to kneel down and listen to their longing, learn their song, their flourishing and decay; a place where earth’s unapologetic yes reminds our own resilience; a plot of dressed-down miracles that invite us to shed prejudice and meet each moment anew. Question habit. Seek alternative possibilities. Include instead of exclude. Zooming out, what once appeared as chaos reveals gorgeous, me-shrinking, primordial order.

A few weeks ago I sat on a gravel path leading to the hen house. Springtime grass pushed through pebbles and with bare fingers I pulled new blades—each dangling root so innocent I felt a twinge of guilt every time I separated mouth from mother. But the gentle sun was too inviting. The hens clucking nearby, too sweet. I wanted to sit in mindful/lessness and just be for a while. Skinny green breaths gently returned me to the now. Hands busy, head hushed, I unbecame into the season—my diminuendo’ed purpose inside an orchestra of renewal. I could pour boiling salt water over the path, or god-forbid spray with weed kill, but who then, kills whom? Without this simple task, I would’ve died into a day of doing. Even in the act of removal, weeds restored me.

So I listen. What do they say?

Bowing. Can I trust their way?

While drifting pappus ushers innocence

and fawn grazes her leaves into grace,

I wonder, What Queen Anne’d way 

doesn’t inspire love songs and lace? 

So I surrender and join

all that fecundity feeds;

with skin of my skin a blur

I defend the weeds.

Oregon’s Cirsium vulgare refuting her name in angelic glory.