It’s been a complicated but wonderful spring.
The summer comes on so quickly here. I had a month and a half to do ritual outdoors comfortably in the nice circle that I cleared and laid for myself before it became swelteringly hot for the majority of each day, and I had to return to lighting candles on convenient indoor flat surfaces. The trade-off is the ongoing and never-ending wonder of the garden, which is in its second year.
The year of experience has worked to my benefit. This year I started by focusing on plants for the pollinators. My garden is full of beautiful flowers and herbs I’ve let go to flower for the bees, and we’ve installed a little bee hotel. The red geranium, like my grandmother kept, stands sentry at the backdoor. The summer squash leaves have flourished to multiple times the size of my hand, and the first buds of squash have started to come. Every day I see the effects of my hard work on the biodiversity of the yard: Bees of all types, including native bees; newly-hatched mantises, so small they can barely be seen; skinks of multiple species; lizards and green anoles hiding in crevices; all kinds of birds, from titmice to cardinals to mourning doves; toads have made their homes against the porch; one of several frogs comes to sit on the window and catch bugs each night; the old rabbit has come back every evening at dusk, doing our weeding for us. The garden is so alive and beautiful. It is the only place in this area that I’ve seen any fireflies, off in the leaves in the late afternoon and sometimes resting in the herbs. It is a garden not just for me, but for everything here.
I’ve been sitting out a lot with the plants. Rue has come to me strongly in recent months. Some plants have always felt aloof to me in a way that is hard to explain: The basil, for example, is beautiful, and I appreciate and use it and tend to it lovingly, but we’ve never connected as “personalities.” Rue speaks to me so loudly and openly that I planted more than I originally intended, and it has flourished.
I’ve worked with the rest of the plants on the land as well, tending to the sister birches that watch over the house and listening to the complaints of the oaks. I had an interesting experience with one of the oaks where it informed me that there was a cord wrapped around it that I had not seen that needed to be removed. I had to go get a ladder to find and reach it, and found that it had been there so long that it was nearly embedded, which I never would have noticed otherwise. It is one of those nearly-trivial experiences of building trust and offering yourself in service to the ecosystem that left a lasting impression on me.
I have been thinking a lot lately about my role in the ecosystem, not just on this land but in others’ lives. A witch friend has been moving house, and I have been spending a lot of time helping them, despite my physical limitations and injuries: This has taught me a lot about my own social and physical limits. The community center is changing, and I have been working extensively in a safety-building capacity to stop abuse: This has been an ongoing and life-long lesson in the imperfect balancing act of pleasing every member of a community. Like tending to the land, I like to believe that these are ecosystems that I can leave better than I found them as well, even when it is difficult.
My extensive focus on land-work this season has paid off. There are other places I try to build relationships with, though naturally those relationships can’t look the same as the one I have with my own garden, but the practice with sitting out with the plants has paid off when I go elsewhere and try to make new friends. The photo is from a recent visit to a nature preserve I frequent, where I was hoping to forage some mullein. All of the mullein had been removed, but while I was examining and identifying other plants on the footpath, I felt drawn to move off the path in a certain direction. I walked into the woods until I nearly tripped over an ally I have been looking for all season: American mandrake, or mayapple, in a secluded patch. Unprepared to collect mandrake at that moment, I gave my thanks, gave an offering of honeycomb to the spirits that led me there, and planned to return.