Surely Some Revelation is at Hand

Welcome to The Meadow Between

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 blog 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.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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.

photo by Jen Wewers

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.

celadine poppy breaking through by Jen Wewers