the dandelions

dispatch 56

Feb 07, 2024

hello friends! I’m so glad to be back in your inbox after a break in January. It was a joy for me to revisit some older posts, but what did you think? Winter has been throwing me for a bit of a loop this year with so much change and a struggle to find new routines to support me. All is well, I am just learning that it is okay to take a little extra space to adjust when I need it.

How is winter treating you, sweet friend?

This week’s essay came from a reunion call with friends after a year where we all separately moved through difficult things but managed to make our way back to each other. I am oh so grateful for sunny spots on gray days.

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A black background with a white puffy dandelion with a green stem just off center to the left. There are seeds taking to the air into the upper right corner. — Image from Unsplash by Herbert Goetsch

the dandelions

On the inner crease of my right elbow is a line drawing of a dandelion with five downy seeds caught in an act of surrender to the breeze. Obtained with my beloveds in a Denver tattoo shop, inked by an adorable young queer who kindly and quite convincingly pretended that they thought five manic sobers in their 30s and 40s, hopped up on closeness and cold brew, were very cool. And while I agree wholeheartedly, I find that as I get older I am more aware of and more grateful for the kindness of youth.

I am glad every time I find it anew on my arm, tucked gently and safely against my body. There are five of these exact drawings in the world, each one on a person that I love. How incredible, that in all of the world, these five tender creatures found each other? These five little creatures decided to belong to each other. Evidence of miracles, right on my skin.

The dandelion is called such from the way its yellow blooms look like a mane and its geometric leaves resemble a mouth (if you really want to see it). Lion’s teeth. Its name implies a fierceness that its appearance does not.

For a long time, I perhaps knew them best as the nemesis of suburban dads like mine in the mid-90s, a threat to monoculture and reputations everywhere. An everyday, unsuspecting renegade that I could touch. For far longer, the dandelion has been known as Taraxacum officinale. The officinale denoting its use in medicine, crowning it a plant of healing. I have come to know it that way too. I know that many people don’t believe that plants have consciousness or consciences but I do. I have dandelions to thank for that. As they do in the wild, they were the first plants to make their way into my heart so that others could find a safe home there.

It is the first, though likely not the last plant that I will trace onto my body. The dandelion, with its good-natured tenacity, is a generous ally. Its young leaves make a delicious bitter salad that begs for lemon juice. Its roots, with their light nutty flavor, support and repair the liver, (adding a new layer of meaning to our inking of it on sober skin). These long taproots allow dandelions to thrive in depleted soil where other things cannot, and so they pave the way for future plant and animal ecosystems. They are regenerative, willing to go first and start from scratch. And in this world where we have been taught to believe that the doctrine of survival of the fittest is unbreakable, that it is everyone for themselves, the dandelion uses its root structure to pull nutrients from deep into the soil, not just for itself but for others. The dandelion shares, even and especially when it doesn’t seem that there is very much to share. A dandelion is a garden’s open palm.

Somehow, because nature is abundant, there is more. Dandelions are also magic. You can see it in the way that they can grow up in sidewalk cracks and other impossible places despite the order we try to impose upon things. I love that no matter what he tried (and I don’t even want to think of the chemicals that were probably spread on every lawn in Levittown, NY throughout the 90s), they always outsmarted my dad and really all the dads and keepers of lawns that I have ever known. They are well named, lion-like in this way.

And when they pop their yellow heads open like so many tiny dots of light, they always seem so impossibly yellow. A gift of yellow, the kind of yellow that reminds you that color exists. But then, of course, they become those delicate puffs of white fluff, incredible really when you think of their bright yellow origin. Suddenly there they are, round and perfect or slightly battered, sending their future dreams off into the sky. The shape of a wish, right there on every lawn. A field of wishes.

There is something about renewal when it comes to dandelions, the way they pull from the soil…this gift of all our dead, and then take to the air carrying future hope. They are a bridge between past and present, present and future. Between what we have been and who we will be. And when I look at that tiny little drawing on my arm and think of my loved ones, dispersed around the world, becoming more and more of who they are each day, I know we chose well. I recognize it in the ways that our friendships sprung from impossible conditions and the stubborn ways that we retain them across time and distance. In the ways that they heal me and the safe space they make for my wishes to take to the air. It is a symbol, and a strong one. An ode to something that is mortal but cannot die. A talisman to friendship.

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