THIS LAND IS MY LAND

A Metaphor For How I See Myself

There is wild and tangled prolific life-force found in a blackberry cane, english hawthorn, wild rose, in plantain and dandelion, teasel and black walnut when you live in Northwest Oregon. 

Picking plums on a hot afternoon, my friend shares that in Arizona, there are no side-of-the-road-sweet-stops like there are here— jumping over irrigation ditches, wasteland lots still alive enough to fruit, shirttails as baskets filled to spill. The ground is dry, little grows. Fruit is a high profit crop. I consider the bounty, the soon to ferment pungency of such richness just dropping at our feet. 

I have been tasting the wildness of the season, a slow savoring on my tongue. Seeing the stain of color on skin, spitting pits and seeds from between my teeth. I am observing what I planted last season and two years prior as I walk the edges and middles of this one acre property, flowers and herbs and vegetables and how I have let the weeds grow, grasses and queen anne's lace, thistles. Garden rows are messy. There is not a clear inch of soil, but a high density understory forest of its own kind. There are so many different plants growing in a single square foot. I think of a man I met at the farmers market. After sharing how deer were jumping my fences I desperately asked, how do I keep them from eating the crops? He said: let the thistles grow. This diversity is one part, my doing by allowing it, the rest— nature. 

Last year, I was this garden. Ever since the beginnings of my re-wilding, it has been an ongoing, slow growing perception shift for how I see the environment around me. I recognized the overwhelm I felt seeing spring’s robust growth overtake my tiny seedlings, yet I could also see the vibrancy of green and how birds and caterpillars and bees needed these and I understood that this nature wanted to be here. What am I fighting for? My ideologies, my vision, my perspective for how this living breathing system filled with individual species of lifeforms should exist? I could no longer align myself with what I had known. I wanted to know why these wild plants were so determined for abundance. What can I learn from them?

When I stopped fighting myself—it was when I became so ill I could barely move my body across rooms without having to slump against a wall and sit until the racing in my heart and tremors subsided. The severity of this nervous system response lasted months, and I had no choice but to completely surrender into my own vulnerability. I had no diagnosis that could prescribe a certain pill or even a plan of action, and what happened was a face off with my own fear. I write a little about this in the introduction to my book of poetry, We Are Wanderers, how when I stopped doing, I had to acknowledge my being. What is in me? Who am I without all my effort and intentions and behaviors, what is the energy moving through the landscape of myself and what am I if I have no external proof for validation? How much exists beyond the surface. Deep into the layers of the earth and into the depths of ourselves, there are measures of hidden life that are moving and creating and growing and there is so much we do not know, until we begin to dig or inquire or listen. This is shadow work, deep sea diving, space exploration, and archeology. There are endless metaphors. But here, in the recesses of myself that I had spent decades suppressing and controlling, I yielded and allowed the buried to emerge.

Carl Jung stated, 

“The shadow is 90% pure gold. We think we’ll only find darkness there. But underneath the refuse, underneath the repressions, there are veins of gold.”

There is a lot to recover from the inside. 

This is the miracle and wonder of children—emerging from a womb space in total newness, everything is primitive and innate, the world is wondrous and curious and expression is pure emotion and response. Logic and reasoning, mental conditioning comes in time and is based on caregivers and teachers' influence, experiences, how a child was met by others within impacting circumstances. 

What we end up wearing as we grow into adulthood is what we were given, and at some point in life we will question our attire. Does it fit? Do I even like what I wear? Does it feel good on my body? Are these my clothes or someone else’s? We must get naked. I am again, speaking in metaphor, but this is the beauty of symbology, we also embody our metaphors literally. So let the light shine on those hidden places to see what is real, both internally and externally. 

To let the garden go—to begin letting yourself show without repression is messy, chaotic, misunderstood by many. There might be judgment, assumptions, critical responses from those whose gardens would never show fireweed and wild cucumber overtaking the rhodie patch. These might be those who think of themselves as experts, experienced in the ways of a proper garden, based from their personal perspective and education. And then there are the few, who walk into your garden with total openness and see the wildness, not the mess, see the natural way of life, not expectations. These are the people who turn a corner of your yard and say, “Wow! It is so untamed and that is beautiful, I feel both excited and calm here!” 

At this stage of re-wilding, these are the people to invite back to your garden. Have a picnic, stay a while, because we need those who can see the value of transition. This is a process—change. 

What is it I am trying to say? Maybe, that I am no longer looking at what life springs up as something to immediately pull, clean out or cover up— as something that shouldn’t be there. I am opening my perception for nature’s way to teach me more about who I am and who she is, opening to the intelligence that exists under the surface, hidden out of sight, knowing now, that there is a purpose and a gift in what I have denied, forced and fought, as I allow it a place to be seen, observed, appreciated. In time, as I learn from these new sources, gain new experiences, I can make new choices in how to actively participate with this nature, in a way more attuned to the true gifts within me and in support to what is around me. 

I am not advocating for noxious weed takeover. I know how fast scotch broom can cover a hillside after a clearcut, but there, lies the curiosity—what is this nature wanting to protect? Where there was once a forest ecosystem there is now a barren sunny slope covered by a fast growing prolific “weed,” and it has the cheeriest yellow shade of flowers, in mass it is stunning.

My massage therapist whispered to me on the table a few months ago—Ask your plant allies for help. What grows well? Pay attention, there is wisdom. We were talking about negative self narratives, the stories we tell ourselves.

I recently met another woman who is a musician, she receives her melodies and lyrics from plants. She looked into my eyes and said, Self-heal is the most recent plant that has come to me. Its song is deep, very deep.

There is wealth within us and around us. Life is longing for itself. 

“What we need is here.” -Wendell Berry