The Courtesy of Weeds

Truth-Tellers, Scapegoats, and a Compass Found in Plants and Myth

The afternoon was cool, one of those typical spring days when the sun played tag with the rain. I kneeled there in damp dirt, a small shovel in hand, a garden glove warming the other, thumbing through the overgrown planter in our new front garden for the first time: Hairy stem, saw-toothed hearts curled upward, yellow lantern, green needles feathering thick, brown thorny branch, sticky stalks. It was a mess. The kind that speaks to visitors: I’ve been abandoned. Things are dirty and unkept here. There’s little to trust. The small rose bush, a cultivated Belle of the Ball, with her prudish seeding needs me to remove those weeds that would threaten her spotlight.

The quackgrass was easy, a mop of unbrushed hair, lack of symmetry, random static jamming the mulch. He seemed mean. However, the yellow avens were a more difficult choice. I hesitated. Her dainty canary petals like rays bursting from a lime star, renaissance queen in her ruff, frill collar, yet she still threatened the order. I identified her first, as if that could help me offer a memorial, or read the classification: weed, and justify my pulling.

I learned she’s also part of the rose family, sometimes mistaken for buttercup, but untamable, edible, pollinator magnet, she spreads her spiky seed balls with wild pleasure through forest, meadow, and river edge. She’s pulled for being aggressive. She threatens to choke out the more desirable, civilized, expensive flowers in the garden. So, like a tyrant, I threw her in the compost pile to rot and return, but stopped, looking at her wilted body out of slight remorse.

My grief led me to do further research and I learned of her intriguing ability to indicate heavy metal pollution in the soil. This inspired me: the courtesy of weeds. I had studied already their medicinal qualities, how they’ll pop up around your garden when you’re in need of their wisdom and the particular remedies they carry, how they were used for all kinds of illness, and magical purposes by our ancestors. I’ve chewed plantain into poultice in a pinched panic on the occasions one of my children were stung by a yellow jacket.

But, what I didn’t know about weeds is that they also tell us about the conditions of the soil they grow in. Like little, ruthless truth tellers, they let us know what’s off balance, what needs tending to beneath the surface where the eye is untrained and oblivious.

And yet, here we are, finding them beastly, worried that they’ll sully our perfectly manicured gardens or yards of clean-cut, pollution grass. We often miss the messages they carry. A whole industry of poison born just to eliminate their offensive savagery.

Then, it occurred to me. The way we relate to weeds is but a mirror reflecting how we relate to nearly everything in a superficial society ruled by eyesight and ego.

In that yellow avens, I saw myself, and the culture that raised me. It helped me to understand why my family could not contain me, and why for centuries the delicate, cultivated ego of civilized society has treated whole races of people like weeds—a nuisance to be tamed, feared, controlled, banished and plucked from the gracious garden of eden to protect a story that can not afford scrutiny.

We, like the weeds, tell the truth, simply by being. We indicate turmoil beneath the surface of families and post-colonial consumerism. It’s the burden we knew we’d have to bear when accepting the blessing of our nature here, and taking root in the story of this earth garden.

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In the pages that follow, I’ll trace the role of the truth teller in family systems and society, and why it so often leads to scapegoating. I will offer a slice of my own story, what I’ve gathered along my journey. Then, I will widen the lens to the collective, and offer a way through the wilderness: how to set down the scapegoat’s burden and reroot in a soil that can hold us.

This piece is for me. It’s for you, the black sheep, the middle children, the ones chosen to carry the messy, untamable seeds of truth in their roots; the scapegoats, the marginalized, the wild twins. It’s for the people of this world who have borne the harshest consequences of our sins—the ones looked upon as less than, the forgotten, the voiceless, whose very existence keeps serving a potent truth serum no matter how fiercely we try to banish it.

If this speaks to you, I am grateful for your support of my writing, and am also offering:

• An exploration of the Old Irish Immram (a hero’s sea journey to the other world) and how it might offer a map home

• A rune reading and guided shamanic rune journey for the scapegoat

I hope to meet you at the other end.

How I let the Weeds Teach Me to Tend

My parents do not approve of me.