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 it’s 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.