September 11th started no differently.

September in NYC is gorgeous. The heat, humidity, and smell of urine in the streets move out, and we embrace the clear, cooler days of fall. So many of us who were there that day talk about the blue sky. What a beautiful morning. The sky was so blue. Max was 18 months old and barking orders at his dad from his throne in the stroller. Bob and I were probably talking about what he was going to pick up for dinner. It was a normal, simple morning. One we never expected to remember.

We reached my office a little before nine. I kissed them both goodbye — Bob, and then Max. Bob turned the stroller back the way we’d come toward the rest of an ordinary day.

Neither of us knew the first plane had already hit.

Thinking of who I was with that morning: my colleagues at Beth Israel Medical Center Development office— Molly, Tatiana, Sandra, Vickie, Zarela, and others. Our morning unfolded 2.5 miles from what would become known as Ground Zero.

Almost as soon as we had arrived for work, we heard something had happened. The news arrived in snippets. Sandra started crying when she heard a plane had hit one of the towers. Her cousin worked there. Which tower was it? Human Resources had a TV in their office and they were watching the news. Sandra ran up there.

We were all trying to reach friends and family. We didn't know what was happening. Cell phones weren’t working.

The sky was so blue.

In about 45 minutes we would look out our windows at the streams of people walking up from the World Trade Center and downtown. We could see them covered in dust. That line of people would last for hours.

From that moment, we all started trying to make our way home.

After Bob and Max had dropped me off at Beth Israel, they headed down to Tompkins Square Park — the locus of our life in NYC once Max was born. Later that day Bob shared that when they got to Tompkins, a woman told them a plane had just flown over the park so low that it scared her. Within a few minutes, they both learned what had happened to that plane and those aboard it.

I still couldn’t reach Bob. I had no idea where he was. But I also knew that my native New Yorker would run toward trouble before he’d run from it. I knew he would be headed down Avenue A toward the World Trade Center to find out what was happening. And he would be pushing a stroller with our son in it.

I picked up the landline phone and called home to Kansas. I needed to hear my dad’s voice. Mom answered. I told her I was okay. Dad got on the phone, and it was the first time I allowed myself to cry. “Dad, I don’t know where Bob and Max are. What if they were on a long walk downtown?” My dad said quietly and calmly, “Honey, I am sure they are fine. They are okay, and you will be okay. I love you.”

As a parent, I cannot fathom how hard it must have been for my folks to take that call.

Around the same time I left work to find Bob and Max, Bob’s oldest son, Kevin, was working at the American Stock Exchange. The guys on the trading floor felt the first tower fall and the dust and debris came pouring in. Everything went dark. But they didn’t know exactly what had happened. They also had no idea what was about to happen — the second tower falling.

They stood together debating what to do. Do we stay? We don’t know what is happening. Do we go? If we go, where do we go? We don’t know what’s on the other side of the door. They made a decision.

They wrapped cloths around their faces, opened the door, and ran west to the Hudson River. Boats came for them — Coast Guard, water taxis, ferries, yachts, tugboats, fishing boats, anything that floated. Kevin was one of thousands those boats carried across to New Jersey.

It is considered the largest maritime evacuation in history: over half a million people were rescued, and Bob's son was among them.

I eventually found Bob and Max, and they had been down on Houston Street. Bob said the smoke and air were so bad he couldn’t keep walking downtown.

Once we found each other, we did what New Yorkers do — we went outside, walked our neighborhood streets, tried to figure out what we could do to help. We bumped into someone from church. The three of us stood in the middle of First Avenue, wondering if there was anywhere we could give blood. I would learn, when I returned to work, that along 16th Street Beth Israel staff had set up decontamination tents and other emergency supplies. But no one came.

No one came.

At Astor Place, we entered the KMart. As we stepped off the escalator, we were met with hundreds of dusty shoes lying in random piles all over the floor. It took a minute for me to figure out what had happened. To my right were aisles of empty shoe racks. The shoe department was decimated. All of those people, mostly the women who’d been wearing their work heels, had descended on Kmart for flats to make the long trek home. No buses or subways were running. All the bridge-and-tunnel folks had to get home by walking.

We lived at the corner of 14th Street and First Avenue. No car or truck traffic was allowed south of 14th. We walked (and pushed Max in his stroller) around the East Village streets empty of cars, delivery trucks, and buses.

It was so quiet — except for the sound of fighter jets flying overhead.

We just wanted to find something to do to help, but there was nothing for us to do.

The National Guard lined 14th Street from the East River Drive to the Henry Hudson. It was surreal to pass armed guards as you crossed familiar streets. It made me realize how sheltered I had been growing up in the States. I had only seen things like this on TV. The days following 9/11 gave me a tiny window into the world that so many of our brothers and sisters around the globe face, living their lives in the midst of war. The first photo is of members of the National Guard lined up next to the ubiquitous barricades — it reminds me of what it looked like on 14th Street. The second is one I took in the days that followed, as we walked downtown closer to Ground Zero.

The memorials. I always tell people I have never felt so loved as I did the days following 9/11. I could feel the energy of all those prayers rushing in to hold us. We visited the memorials in Union Square Park, Washington Square Park, the Armory on 28th Street, and those down by Ground Zero. But it was this one at 14th and Ave A that became a regular part of my life. We walked down Ave A all the time. Chico, the graffiti artist, started working on his memorial mural on 9/12.

We just kept bringing flowers and candles and more flowers and candles... and the notes. The notes from family and friends of those who were missing... missing because we all held hope that someone would be rescued from the mountain of steel and concrete. It made so much sense to me that our memorials would be outside and on the street. That’s where the city is most alive, and that is where we came together, neighbors and strangers, and bore witness to those who died. We prayed for those left behind. And all the children who were growing up in a city so different from the one on 9/10.

With every step, we were walking on hallowed ground.

The air was sacred — no experience in church had ever felt more holy.

An overpowering burning smell did not leave the city for months. Being on the east side, we were lucky the winds were not blowing northeast on 9/11. My Beth Israel pulmonologist also cared for many first responders. I saw him a few weeks after 9/11 to have my lung volumes tested. I was struggling with my asthma and unable to breathe.

FEMA had given us a HEPA vacuum and money for a high-powered air purifier because we lived so close to Ground Zero. In between breathing tests, the pulmonologist shared how he begged the firemen who came to him to take breaks from combing through rubble to give their lungs time to rest and recuperate. Very rarely did they comply with his recommendation. Since 9/11, over 9,000 first responders, recovery workers, and residents have died from 9/11-related illnesses.

As of this week, we, along with the entire world, now know how toxic the air was that we breathed for months. It’s not a surprise to any of us who lived there. We could feel it.

We lived in Stuy Town, the bastion of civil servants, but we only knew of one firefighter who died. Bob had a number of friends who were NYPD, FDNY, NYC Transit Police, and others. Det. James “Jimmy” Wheeler was a longtime neighborhood friend of Bob’s. Jimmy was known for singing “Danny Boy” at every funeral, wedding, christening, or any other time he could cajole everyone to listen. He had a harrowing tale from 9/11. I found an online memo from him and his partner about that day parked in front of the Towers. It describes in detail everything that happened. I remember a photo of Jimmy emerging from the subway covered in dust that ran in a lot of the newspapers. He’s the person I knew who was closest to the immediate aftermath.

Below are photos of Jimmy singing — you guessed it — Danny Boy, at my wedding in 2004. I remember listening and thinking how easily things could have been so different, and I never would have been serenaded by him. Danny Boy sounded the sweetest that day.

There was a coffee cart on the corner I rounded each workday at 17th and Park Avenue South. It was run by a sweet man. I didn’t know much about his life beyond our few minutes each morning. Niceties exchanged. He always remembering my order: coffee with cream and a cranberry orange muffin. He brought an easy kindness to this regular ritual.

The day after 9/11, his cart wasn’t there.

I didn't think much of it at first. But as the days went on and the corner stayed empty, and as anti-Muslim sentiment began spreading across the country, my worry took a different shape. I didn’t know if he was safe. I didn’t know if someone had hurt him, or scared him into hiding, or worse. The same city that was pouring itself out in flowers and candles and prayer was also, I knew, capable of turning on people who looked like the hijackers, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it.

Weeks later, his cart was back. And so was he. It turned out he’d been on his annual trip home to Egypt to see family — a trip he took every year, its timing just happening to fall across the worst weeks in the city’s history.

When I told him I'd worried, he smiled. It struck me that this is what the street culture of New York is built on: not grand relationships, but small daily ones, repeated so often we become our own kind of family for each other. He reached under the cart and handed me a bookmark he’d brought back from Egypt. He winked as he told me he only gave them to his favorite customers. I still have it.

The weekend after 9/11, we explored Lower Manhattan. We did our normal park visits, watching the kids play and wondered what kind of world they were going to grow up in now. These adorable kids. So innocent. Running around screaming like usual, the parents quiet and whispering to each other.

After 9/11, there were no more “any other days.”

2,753 people died in the World Trade Center. So little of their physical remains were left behind.

I’ve read that only 300 bodies were recovered whole.

Only 300.

The smallest particles of them were carried on the wind, into the harbor, into us. The only way I can make sense of it all is to think about the sacrament of Communion. Those of us who lived, I believe, carry the victims in our bodies. We breathed the air, we walked the streets, our bodies became their final resting place.

We carry them into a future they never got to live.

What do we do with that? What are we asked to do in memory of them?

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

ee cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Then, I kid you not, within two days I could feel the pressure building in my sinuses, the headache, the stuffiness, all of it. By day three it had moved to my lungs. I can never stave it off, but I try: water, rest, saline rinse. I call my allergist’s office and answer a series of questions I’ve been answering since I was fourteen, because yes, this has been my doctor’s office that long. The nurse calls in a script for Augmentin. Within a few days I’ll breathe again, and all the gunk the inflammation has made will start moving up and out. My dad taught me how to cough “productively.”

My first asthma attack. Three years old. I remember it was night, my dad carrying me into my grandfather’s ENT office. The overhead fluorescent lights guided us like runway lights toward Pa’s office. I can still smell the Brotherhood Office Building at 5th and State. Too young to swallow pills, Pa crushed the prednisone into water and I took it from a spoon. The bitter taste of prednisone — if you know, you know.

I never grew out of asthma, like so many promised me. I carry a lot of anxiety about getting sick, anxiety that can border on irrational. But there’s muscle memory feeding that fear, and it’s not unreasonable. I remember the pre-vaccine days of COVID. I had a medical exemption to work from home. My boss wanted everyone in the office anyway, and denied it. I was back for a week when I caught COVID. I drove myself to the hospital, my oxygen in the low 80’s. They kept me a week. I wasn’t intubated, but it was eerie having the nurses come in full PPE: white jumpsuits, so many layers between us. My lungs are weaker; when I get sick, I get sick fast and hard. The anxiety is rooted in experience. I just hate how it takes me over. How it limits me.

The turn from summer to autumn is often when I’m most vulnerable, lung-wise. Ragweed and the rest of what’s blooming make the shift harder every year. I start limiting my time outside, which coincides with my annual abandonment of the garden to fend for itself.

It’s around this time my elderberry bushes, Sambucus canadensis, ripen. I watch the hard green berries turn a purple so deep it’s almost black. As they grow heavy, I know the crisp air isn’t far behind. Then, as always seems to happen overnight, the bushes go from heavy with fruit to bare. Only empty fuchsia stems remain. Fleshy tatting. Intricate elderberry lace, evidence of what was. The via negativa of the elderberry: knowing the berry through its absence.

Right now, wrestling for a few moments of unobstructed breathing, I notice how the empty red pedicels resemble the lungs’ circulatory system. I find myself envious of the elder’s unobstructed flow from season to season: growing, ripening, releasing. Whereas I can’t complete a full breath cycle. My breathing, although better, remains short, tight, congested.

We generally think of commonplace, typical, or normal as synonyms for ordinary. The word has always felt flat to me. No peaks, no variations, just plain and monotonous. This does reveal something about who I am. In my 20’s my dad described me as someone who, when faced with something new, tends to dive in rather than stay analytical, measured, and cautious. Not adrenaline-junkie diving-out-of-airplanes, but someone who, at an edge, a boundary, a threshold, tends to keep going.

For someone like that, to be called ordinary, to live an ordinary life, would be anathema. But as I move closer to turning 60, I find myself longing for ordinary. For safety. For common sense. For some predictability.

If I’m honest, I think it’s the exhaustion. Not tired from one thing. Tired from years of this country lurching from one upheaval to the next with no room to catch a breath in between. Francis Weller has a name for it: he calls this season we are in the absence of the ordinary itself. It’s not a season we’re passing through in a somewhat predictable pattern, but rather the very rhythms we have relied on in our shared communal life are broken. When I read that, I recognized what my longing actually was. Not nostalgia. Rather, my body, asking for the sequence back. For things to come in their turn again.

And this is where Ordinary Time (capital O) comes back in. In the Christian liturgical calendar, Ordinary Time is everything outside Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter: the stretch after the Baptism of Jesus until Ash Wednesday, and the longer stretch from Pentecost to the First Sunday of Advent. We are in this Long Green Season right now.

It’s easy to hear ordinary and think no big deal, nothing happening. But the word’s root is Latin ordo — row, rank, order — the same root behind order and ordain. It never meant plain or unremarkable. It meant in keeping with the regular order of things. What comes in its turn, not as interruption, but as sequence.

In the garden this morning, I could see the turn toward autumn that’s been building over the last few weeks. Living on the prairie, I’ve learned this rhythm, flowers and plants starting to die back is a sure sign winter is on its way. Our summers are brutal, and it’s easy to let the garden go a bit by August. I do it every year.

The garden, at least, still knows its sequence, even when nothing else does. This turn in the season is predictable, the same way my melancholy is predictable as the sun starts setting earlier each evening. My body knows what’s coming. Even if I don’t like it, it’s still a rhythm I can rely on. And maybe that’s part of what Ordinary Time means, a predictable sequence. The lush vibrancy of summer gives way to the garden dying back, autumn moving into winter.

My sunflower holds it all right now, blooming and dying back on the same stem.

Not everything is going quiet, though. The beautyberry, tall coreopsis, chocolate daisy, ironweed, blue sage, goldenrod, asters. All of them are coming into their own at this moment, vivid and undeterred.

The beautyberry doesn’t cancel out the sunflower. Nor the sunflower, the beautyberry. They’re both just true at once, right here, right now.

This too is part of our prairie rhythm.

An unobstructed view that invites me to see both.

Planted squarely in the midst of the living and the dying.

As a seminary intern, I worked with clients who were homeless and living with mental illness. Together, we arranged an art show, Silent Undercurrents, their work, hung in my seminary. Our daily noon chapel was the opening of the show and a reception. The artists spoke about what their work meant to them. I spoke about what they meant to me.

I remember looking around that room — my professors, my classmates, people who had never stood in that particular in-between before — and understanding, for the first time, that liminal space wasn’t just something I could enter. It was something I could hold open for others to enter too.

As an assistant chaplain at Bellevue Hospital, chaplaincy taught me the most about holding space, especially liminal spaces, for others. Folks living in the spaces between sickness and health, life and death, coherent and unraveling. My most hard-won learning was that being a chaplain wasn’t a role to take on. Chaplaincy, instead, was teaching me about everything I had to let go of — my ideas, my assumptions, the heady theories that kept me at a safe distance from the patient. That whole summer was learning to peel away what kept me from being fully present, feeling my feelings, being myself as I kept vigil with someone else’s unfolding.

It is as alive to me now as it was then.

Long after seminary, life continued to bring me to the brink of myself (as it does for all of us). Pregnancy and the birth of my son. An abortion. The deaths of my parents and stepdaughter in quick succession. Each experience brought me to a new threshold. The ground I thought was reliable gave way. No longer the person I used to be and unsure of who I would become. My only choice in those seasons was to fight for what had been, or surrender to the unknown. Usually I tried both, but on a few rare occasions, I stood still.

I remember standing in my parents’ kitchen, my mom had died the year before, and I was watching my friends pulling out serving utensils, setting out plates and silverware, preparing the “good food” my dad had requested for after his funeral. My feet were planted on the kitchen floor. I watched in awe as they took care of everything around me, because honestly, I just couldn’t.

At that time, I believed receiving gifts from people created a debt, an obligation, to return the generosity. A deeper, wiser part of me knew it wasn’t true, but “good girl Jenny” hung on to the debt. After my mom’s death and then my dad’s, I stood there knowing it would be impossible to ever “pay back” all these people for taking such good care of me, my son, and my brothers. So much help, so much love. My only choice was to receive it. To let the love wash over me. To surrender.

Thirteen years have passed from that day in my folks’ kitchen. I now find myself standing in my native gardens, meadows and prairies, aware of that same feeling - being undone by the sheer generosity and abundance of it all. My spiritual practice is reminding me I live in both/and. I am the threshold and I hold the in-between spaces.

I keep returning to this idea that if liminal spaces exist in life, in a body, in a season of grief, they must exist somewhere in the land too. So began my quest. Where am I, this lover of the prairie and liminal spaces, planted?

Not surprisingly, I discovered I live in an actual physical liminal space - an ecotone. I was born and raised and currently live in the forest-grassland ecotone. A transition zone, a meeting ground, a dialogue between two ecosystems that gives birth to something new. The part of the country where the Eastern deciduous forests gradually give way to Mixed Oak and Hickory trees, and grassland increases, that transition eventually completed by my beloved tallgrass prairie.

As much as I have loved my sojourns in other states and countries, I only feel truly at home in this land between forest and grassland — where the sky is massive, and the prairie plants sway to the wind like the surface of some green, landlocked ocean. This threshold land birthed me. The liminal experiences throughout my life were seeded in this ground that first held me.

I read those words after my phone alarm went off on Tuesday morning, the third day in the Octave of Easter. A time to celebrate life, not destroy it. In 1979, as a girl, I wrote in my diary about fearing the Iran Hostage Crisis would cause a nuclear war. Then, I feared for the US hostages, now, I fear for the Iranian people.

Last week, I wrote a post on henbit, a plant native to Iran. I wanted to write about my fear and anger toward the political leaders of my country, but everything I typed felt like a social media tirade. So I went back to the garden, to what was blooming in my yard, and researched the native plants and flowers of Iran. That’s when I found the henbit and her story began to unfold. By telling her story, I could tell my own. By attending to the henbit, it became a part of me. But I wanted more, to go even deeper.

That’s when I found Forugh Farrokhzad, an Iranian woman and poet.

Forugh died in 1967, one year before I was born. Twelve years before the Islamic Revolution. The revolution that led to her poetry being banned for more than a decade. When I first read Bathing, I was startled by its sensuality. I think I may have blushed a bit...her raw, lusty words were the last thing I expected.

I shed my clothes in the lush air
to bathe naked in the spring water,
but the quiet night seduced me
into telling it my gloomy story.
The water’s cool shimmering waves
moaned and lustily surrounded me,
urged with soft crystal hands
my body and spirit into themselves.
A far breeze hurried in,
poured a lapful of flowers in my hair
breathed into my mouth Eurasian mint’s
pungent, heart-clinging scent.
Silent and soaring, I closed my eyes,
pressed my body against the soft young rushes,
and like a woman folded into her lover’s arms
gave myself to the flowing waters.
Aroused, parched, and fevered, the water’s lips
rippled trembling kisses on my thighs,
and we suddenly collapsed, intoxicated, gratified,
both sinners, my body and the spring’s soul.

by Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by Sholeh Wolpe

Can you feel the cool water? Smell the damp minty air?

Forugh fought against the forces that tried to drown out her voice. Married at 16 to escape her family, divorced by 19, her ex-husband refused to let her see her son. She had a nervous breakdown, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and underwent electroconvulsive treatments. She died in a tragic car accident at 32.

Even with so much tragedy, nothing was as important as surrendering to her truth, speaking with a sensual, unapologetic freedom in 1960s Iran.

What started as an attempt to make a connection between me and Iran, that initially found voice through the henbit, found a deeper connection through Forugh’s poetry. With the henbit, I wrote how attention is an act of love. Forugh’s poems have deepened my understanding of the power of attention. By attending to her as one tiny part of a culture that my government wants to annihilate, my curiosity and love become an act of resistance.

Forugh wrote of Eurasian mint. I have been exploring the henbit. Today I saw my first bumblebee of the year drunk on the lavender henbit flowers. A bumblebee being fed by a plant that crossed the ocean in the dark belly of a ship close to 300 years ago. Just like Forugh’s verses, both survived and found their way into my soul.

photo by Tray Lamkins

On Monday, a tiny dollop of yellow at the edge of my vision pulled my attention - celandine poppy (stylophorum diphyllum). Its first bud, all fuzzy and yellow, still turned in on itself. Just beginning to unfold.

Last summer I answered a call in our Kansas Native Plant Society Facebook group: Moving to Oregon. Want to share plants from my native gardens.

Some people rescue dogs. I rescue plants.

I arrived with a shovel, nursery pots, and paper grocery bags.

Mandy greeted each new arrival. She pointed out the plants to take, told us what they were, how they grew best. She was passing on her knowledge and experience and encouraging us to take a chance - on the plants, of course, but also on our ability to root them in our gardens. She was realistic knowing some transplants wouldn’t survive and released us from any guilt if they didn’t make it. After all, it was August and the worst time to try to transplant any living thing in Kansas.

We aimed to keep as much soil on the root balls as possible. My pots weren’t big enough. The paper bags ripped. I ended up just walking to my car with shovels full of dirt and plants, raw-dogging it. The most real version of native transplanting there is.

Our shared love of natives turned out to be a thread that pulled everything else together. One woman had started the Lenexa Farmer’s Market. Another had helped get the Stormwater Project going, which helped me fund a backyard transition to natives including elderberry and nannyberry, fragrant sumac and asters, coreopsis and spiderwort, big and little bluestem. The plants connected us. We were no longer strangers.

I thanked Mandy and wished we had met a few years ago. Told her I'd send photos in spring so she could see her babies had made it. I gently closed the hatch on my CRV so I didn't crush the tender branches reaching for their old home. For a minute I leaned against the warmth of the car and watched; friends and strangers coming and going, digging in a yard, bound by the possibility of new growth.

In the late 70s, my family moved into our first house on Orville Avenue. I was five. Our neighbors, Annabelle and Jim Morris, welcomed us. Mrs. Morris gifted my mom with purple bearded iris from her garden. The ones that smell like grape soda. I spent hours on their back porch glider snapping beans and shelling peas. And every spring, when the western sun hit the iris petals just right, they were lit from within. The backyard was strung with magical lavender lights.

When COVID arrived my world contracted to the size of my yard. I got serious about native flowers then. In April of 2020, when everything felt like it might simply end, a stranger from my local gardening group drove to my house and brought me all kinds of transplants from her garden. Those first few rudbeckia have multiplied into a never-ending supply for my garden and my neighbors. A new thread in the spiral, two strangers becoming friends, in a Kansas backyard when the world as we knew it was ending. Laughing, learning, and sharing what grows.

I live on a corner and my sidewalk is among the most walked in the neighborhood. The kids use my retaining wall as a balance beam on their way to school. I know the dogs’ names better than their people walking them. Neighbors have watched me haul in rock by rock, load by load of mulch, plant by plant. But over the years they see the difference. A man once told me he always brings his granddaughter to my yard when the Monarchs come. A neighbor started asking what she could plant to bring more butterflies. I started a neighborhood Facebook group for native gardeners where we share seeds and transplants. We are planting webs of connection in our little neighborhood - both for the plants and for us.

Yesterday I searched for Mandy’s messages from last summer with her address and when to come to get the plants.

I sent her a photo of the poppy. Look, I wrote. She made it. I hope you are loving Oregon.

The thread held. Across all those miles. Through all that winter.

I can't imagine my life without this constant widening spiral, always expanding, never losing its center. Community, belonging, healing, joy. Plants moving from yard to yard and stranger to stranger, carrying something that outlasts any single garden.

Yesterday this tiny bud unfurled. After being planted last August in that unrelenting heat and a brutal dry spring with wildly varying temperatures, I didn’t think she’d make it. But she did.

― Robin Wall Kimmerer

On my knees in the garden, I brush aside the winter blanket of oak leaves - dry on top, damp underneath. Searching. A few natives have barely emerged, still hugging their earthen blanket. Not surprisingly, it’s the henbit putting on the most robust show with its dainty purple flowers and dark green leaves.

A common sign of early spring in yards, parks and fields is henbit. I remember driving by a field covered in purple. Pulling over to see what “prairie heather” had stopped me in my tracks, I realized it was just plain old henbit. After that encounter and seeing its purple magic carpet, it left me wanting more.

Photo by KP Bandyopadhyay on Unsplash

Henbit, Lamium amplexicaule, is a member of the mint family. Crush a few of its leaves in your hands and breathe in the herby scent and you will know why it’s family. Not native to the prairie or even to the US, henbit likely made its way here via ships’ ballasts in the 1700s. Seeds were mixed into the sand, soil and rocks loaded at port to keep the ships balanced on their journey across the Atlantic. Once the ships arrived the ballast was deposited on the shore. And henbit took root in America.

Originally it’s native to the Irano-Turanian floristic region, one of the world’s most important evolutionary and biological diversity centers. This little henbit has adapted and thrives in the extremes which describes both its original home as well as the one it has immigrated to in Kansas.

Henbit offers early spring nectar for bees and other emerging pollinators. It’s been used medicinally and is a nutritious, edible wild green packed with iron, fiber, and vitamins A, C, and K. And it’s a musical instrument! The tiny purple flowers sound like a kazoo when blown.

I have been settling in with the henbit for a few weeks now, wondering what it has to teach me? What do I need to learn?

It’s much harder to kill something when you know its name and what it brings to the world by its very being. I think about the lawn lovers with their herbicide and their tidy grass. Perhaps they just haven’t truly met the henbit yet. I’ve seen enough to believe if you allow yourself to really know a plant or a person it changes how you move through the world. It changes what you're willing to call expendable.

As a chaplain at the bedsides of those who were dying from AIDS in the mid-1990s, I learned that lesson. In particular, I remember Carmen. She had struggled with drug use and was estranged from her family and kids. She was only in her early 40’s but looked much older. I sat with her daily. Listened. Learned Carmen’s story. I was the only person who visited her. The last day I saw her she gave me one of her coloring pages. Her hands shook and her words were failing her, but she wanted me to have this piece of her. The following Monday, I walked in and she was no longer there. Sitting at her bedside all those weeks and doing my best to be fully present was the hardest part of what I learned in chaplaincy training. Ultimately, all I could give was my presence, my attention. Simone Weil wrote often about this. She believed that at its most pure and detached our full attention was prayer embodied. I hope I prayed well with and for Carmen.

You cannot be indifferent to someone you have truly seen. And plants, I am learning, are the same.

Once you know that henbit carries nectar for the first bees of spring, it becomes very difficult to see it as a problem to be solved. Once you know it crossed an ocean in the belly of a ship mixed into sand and soil, traveling in the dark to a new world it had not chosen, you appreciate its adaptability. Once you learn that children blow its tiny flowers like kazoos and call them fairy horns, you cannot look at the field of purple the same way again. It has become a kazoo orchestra.

photo from Tidewater Gardener

Naming is only the start and it’s not just identification. It is the beginning of a relationship. Attention. The first act of love.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in some Native languages, the word for plants translates to those who take care of us. The henbit was here before I knew its name, offering nectar to bees, anchoring soil with its roots, and bringing purple into view again after long gray and brown winters. It never needed my attention to be what it was. But my attention to it, is changing who I am.

I am still learning what henbit is trying to give me. But I think it starts here: that attention is not passive. To really attend to something, to learn its name, its origins, its gifts, its laughter, is to acknowledge its sacredness. And once you have crossed that threshold, the question of whether to kill it becomes impossible to even imagine. Because we become kin with that we attend to.

The purple little kazoos are out there in the fields and in my backyard. The bees are starting to find them.

photo by Jen Wewers, Antioch Park, Overland Park, KS

After a winter away, I find myself returning to where this all began. Why this blog exists. What brought me here.

I started writing this Substack in the autumn of 2025. I was feeling untethered, ungrounded. I was witnessing the destruction of people, communities, and long-held norms and traditions as the second Trump administration took hold. Every day was another assault.

The chaos and cruelty are intentional. This is the world my beloved Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ friends have always lived in. As a white woman, someone who has lived at the thresholds, I thought I understood. But there is a difference between knowing the terrain and feeling the ground give way beneath your own feet.

There was nothing to hold on to. Nothing to stop the fall.

Moments of overwhelm and groundlessness always lead me to Yeats’ description of spiraling:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

When my center cannot hold, I have to hit the ground. I need embodiedness. Presence. Something to anchor me. And yet I have a lifelong struggle with exactly that — being present in my body.

So in that autumn spiral, I started asking: how do I get back to the moment? Out of my head, into my body?

For years I had a meditation practice. I know it helped me. But I had gotten so far outside myself, so full of fear, that even sitting for thirty seconds felt intolerable. Annihilating.

But then something happened. I started remembering.

In the middle of COVID, my interest in native gardening deepened. I dove into two things: native gardening and genealogy. One dug into the earth. The other dug into my earth.

Although I could not sit with the intensity of my anxiety, fear, and rage unmediated — I could tend to my native plants. The elderberries, the milkweed, the foxglove. I could learn the songs of the Carolina wrens until I could identify them from inside my bedroom. I could come to love a garden orb weaver spider and sob when she died after the first hard frost.

As Mary Oliver wrote in Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Instead of willing myself to count my breaths, I let the soft animal of my body love what it loves — my gardens, and the creatures who inhabit them.

The despair of the world continues. Over the winter it has gotten worse. And I can come back to the gardens. To the native plants that teach me how to live in this broken, beautiful world.

These reflections are the pathways that have led me back to the earth — which can hold all that I bring. The despair and the beauty. The struggle and the becoming. I’m here to witness your pathways too, and to encourage you to keep going.

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark,
the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.
— mark nepo

I am attentive to the seeds in my garden. Drawn to them. Searching for them. Collecting them. Scattering them where I hope they might take root next spring.

The pointy orange sulphur cosmos seeds slowly burst, stretching fully until their connection to the stem lessens enough for the wind to carry them away. My seed gathering moves this time frame along a bit. I place my cupped hand beneath their starburst and gently pull, letting the slender spikes gather like tiny darts in my palm.

Butterfly weed takes care of itself. Its pods split open and release silken parachutes to the wind. My native rose mallow leaves behind dry pods that rattle softly when I shake them. When I crack them open, perfect round seeds line up inside — small, dark promises of plate sized white hibiscus flowers.

I sort through the debris, feeling for what is real — the weight, the density, the small hardness that says this one holds life. Sometimes I save them for neighbors, tucking them into little envelopes. Sometimes I pour them into my dad’s old blue graniteware berry bucket. Sometimes I just let them fall from my hands.

So many seeds.

The abundance is humbling.

buried seeds
crack open in the dark,
the instant
they surrender
to a process
they can’t see.

mark nepo

The scientific process of cold stratification is that surrender. The seed must endure the season of cold and wetness. Its outer shell, a hard protective coating, slowly softening through the alternating rhythms of frost and thaw, moisture and dryness. This process creates small places of weakening, where the shell will eventually crack so the inner life can begin its slow journey toward the light.

The darkness is not punishment. It is preparation.

When the outer world feels inhospitable to growth, beauty, or aliveness, something beneath the surface is at work. It is not the end of growth, but its beginning. A hidden cultivation of potential - shoots and roots are already growing within that darkness.

Perhaps this is the metaphor we need now. It is the one I need as we live in this brutal winter of our collective soul. A season that is rife with incomprehensible cruelty, intentional lies, deep division, and the stunning vulnerability of long-held governmental norms and traditions.

Can we risk trusting that beneath the coldness, something new and alive is taking shape?

Can we let our experience of living the seasons, live in us now?

This long dark is softening us, cracking what has been sealed too tightly -
our illusions of control, our comfort in distance, our numbness to one another’s pain. The hard shell is weakening.

Nepo continues, "In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which is ultimately an awakening beyond all imagining. As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as a coneflower or a cosmos, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way."

It cracks all the way.

This darkness surrounding us is not empty or void of life.
It is full of beginnings we cannot yet imagine.

What feels like dormancy is preparation — the quiet work of softening and becoming ready.

The seed, held in darkness, is not lost; it is gathering strength for what comes next.

I swear I can hear Leonard Cohen singing from heaven,

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything —
That’s how the light gets in.

Perhaps the courage of the seed is this very surrender. To allow the cracking, to trust that the light enters not to end the darkness, but to continue the growing.

Have you started to notice the shift?

I wake at the same time I have for months, but lately darkness is sleeping in. When I open the door to let the dogs out, there are bottom notes in the air — coolness, melancholy, and the faintest scent of endings.

Autumn is arriving.

The majority of the Monarchs left town last week. A few strays linger, landing on asters in all their fall glory. But the zinnias grow more weary each day as their edges curl and brown. Meanwhile, the bees, wasps, and soldier beetles are throwing a final late-summer rave on the goldenrod. I’m amazed, watching so much life dancing on its tips, that the goldenrod doesn’t buckle into a backbend under the sheer weight of the party.

Autumn is my favorite season. During the most brutal Midwest summer days I pine for fall. And still, when it arrives, there’s always that familiar ache resting low in my belly. Is it some primal warning, carried in my nervous system, inherited from generations of farmers in Arkansas and before that in Bavaria, and Belgium? Perhaps this restlessness has served for millennia as a reminder: prepare because winter, with its darkness and cold, is coming.

Standing on the door jamb of my back porch, I feel it all at once: the cool air against my cheeks, the slight scent turning toward decay, the whisper of endings.

Perhaps this is what thresholds do best: they remind us of both endings and beginnings, of restlessness and renewal. The cool gust at the door, the curling edges of zinnias, the goldenrod swaying under its late-summer party. All of it whispers the same thing. This restlessness I carry is no accident; it is rooted in my body’s memory, an inheritance that returns each autumn — reminding me to prepare, even as I stand at the threshold of what cannot yet be known.