January and February are usually long months for me. While I truly love all 4 seasons and love living in a place that experiences all 4 seasons to the fullest, by the time February comes around I’m sick to death of the once sparkling, but now brown and crusty snow. My body feels exhausted by trying to stay warm and the dark days have definitely started to affect my mental health. So, when those first sunny days in March appear and we can briefly open our windows and let some fresh air in, I can feel my whole self take in a deep breath. I watch with a thrill as life returns and all my senses are overjoyed by the sound of the first birds, the warmth of the first sun, the smell of the earth waking up, and most especially…the first pop of color returning to the brown canvas. First, everything turns from brown to green, a beautiful, deep green. Then, little patches of various colors appear in the form of wildflowers.
The land where we live has stunning wildflowers and each spring they take my breath away. My kids also delight in discovering new ones that have bloomed and being the first to show me- yellows, whites, pinks, purples all have delighted us and have mostly been purely a gift from the land itself, growing wild in unexpected places, a gift from those who came before us. However, each year I also get a great joy out of sprinkling new wildflower seeds. Some years I buy a mixture of seeds, both perennial and annual. Some years I buy individual packets. If my kids are with me their excitement causes me to overbuy, but I don’t regret it. I am not a botanist by any definition. I can hardly identify more than a handful of the most popular kinds of flowers. I don’t know what is native, what needs sun vs. shade or what will come back each year. Occasionally, I try to do a little research, but usually I just read the back of the packet and start sprinkling seeds in areas where I haven’t noticed as much color. When my friend with a green thumb pops a wild strawberry into her mouth I gasp in surprise. I started giving that spot a little extra water and this year my kids just picked a bowl full of hiding wild strawberries, not even enough calories to count as a snack for the three of us to share, but their worth is much more valuable than mere caloric value. I notice another patch that has grown into our lawn and I ask my husband to mow around it. He humors me and the boundary between wild and landscaped gets blurred and we eat more strawberries. Wild ones-what a gift that was never planted!
Wildflowers are just that to me- a gift, a hidden surprise. One day they weren’t there and the next they have bloomed. Most of them fade fairly quickly, but then a new one with a new color springs up. They attract bumble bees and butterflies and hummingbirds and even more color is added to the canvas. Moving and fleeting color and I don’t want to miss it. So I sprinkle more seeds and I give extra water to the spots I can remember sprinkling from previous years, even though I can’t really remember what was wild and how many years it has been and I know the odds are good that bud popping up will most likely be a weed, but as long as they don’t poke me I just let them grow alongside my wildflowers and everything gets jumbled together including my memory of it all. And sometimes someone says, “why are you watering the weeds?” and sometimes I question my own time and energy and ask myself, “why am I watering mostly weeds?” But then a very tiny pop of color appears for the very first time and I do remember suddenly that was the spot I planted those seeds several years ago and I think I literally am participating in a miracle. And I think about life and how life attracts more life and how beauty makes life worth living and how most of the time that we spend being productive and efficient will never produce such a small little miracle such as this and maybe watering mostly weeds is actually what I am called to do in this life. I want to rage against our culture of efficiency and productivity because I blame my own obsession with efficiency on it. My mind starts thinking about our soil and how little I know about what I’m tending and who knows how likely these seeds will actually grow. But I keep sprinkling and tending because it’s symbolic of my life’s work. I don’t know how to create perfect systems and I’m not tough enough to fight any battles, I can’t even stand the prickly weeds, and I rarely have much to show for my effort but every once in a while…I get to participate in a miracle. Because now there are patches where wildflowers outnumber the weeds and because the wild strawberries have continued to spread and because daisies come back every year and I guess I should have known that since I planted daisies at our first house in town, but I’m pretty sure it’s still a miracle that daisies come back every year. My kids drag me by the arm to go see my “favorite flowers” that are blooming, the wild roses, and our hose doesn’t reach that far on our land so my only participation in them spreading is to marvel and to say a prayer and they must sense my love for them because there are more bushes the next year. So I guess marveling is its own form of participation. So we feed the hummingbirds and more hummingbirds come. I stand at the base of a pine tree and look up and see at least a thousand pine cones…in one tree…a thousand and I marvel at the abundance of life. But then I find mouse poop in the silverware drawer and I pluck 4 ticks off my children and shudder and the prickly weeds multiply too quickly and a part of me understands the desire for sterility. Sterile- being free from bacteria or living organisms or not able to produce children. A part of me understands the desire to keep the wild and the landscaped separate but life begets life and I must choose life. I must choose hope. I know I’m not very efficient in my sprinkling or my watering. I know marveling and efficiency probably never go together. But maybe some of my seeds will get caught in the wind and end up…who knows how far? Maybe pollen from my little flower will help a bee who helps his queen, maybe nectar from my wildflower will feed the hummingbird who lays more eggs, or maybe my flower will just add a few millimeters of color to the landscape for a couple days, and if so, that will be enough. Yes, life is more than enough.