Hi Reader - Happy August. Yep . . . you heard correctly - August. IKR?! When? How?
Saturday, Layle (one half of my BFF sandwich) and I were standing in my backyard, looking at everything growing back there. Issa lot, y'all!
I said most of it looked like weeds to me.
She asked, “What’s the difference between a plant and a weed?”
Well. . . according to the dictionary. . .
A plant is a botanical organism. A weed is a plant growing where someone doesn’t want it.
“Plant” describes what something is. “Weed” describes how someone experiences it in a particular place.
The same dandelion can be a weed in a manicured lawn, medicine in an herbal garden, food on a plate, or beauty to a child making a wish.
The plant remains what it is. The label changes with the garden.
Sometimes you are welcomed, watered, and given room to grow. Sometimes those same qualities are treated as inconvenient, unruly, or out of place.
Your depth is valued in one room and considered too much in another. Your questions create possibility here and discomfort there. Your willingness to grow beyond the boundaries someone imagined for you may be celebrated in one place and managed in another.
Sometimes you’re a plant. Sometimes you’re a weed.
And still, there is something quietly rebellious about a weed.
It grows without permission. It finds its way through cracks. It survives conditions no one prepared for it and disrupts the picture someone else intended to maintain.
Perhaps that is part of what makes it unwelcome. Its presence reveals that control over the garden was never quite as complete as someone imagined.
But once we have determined that something is a weed, what do we do about it?
We pull it up. Cut it down. Poison it. Contain it. Try to keep it from returning.
Or we can pause.
What is this plant doing here?
What conditions allowed it to grow?
Is it crowding out something we have intentionally chosen to cultivate?
Is it protecting exposed soil, feeding pollinators, or revealing something about the health of the ground?
Does it need to be removed, relocated, contained, understood, or simply renamed?
The label “weed” does more than describe something. It prompts a response.
We notice something growing.
We decide what it is.
We assign meaning to its presence.
We respond according to that meaning.
The decision is not only what we do about the weed. A consequential decision has already been made when we name it one.
And when we apply that same sequence to people, ideas, behaviors, or voices, the stakes rise considerably.
Once someone has been identified as disruptive, difficult, or out of place, what responses begin to feel reasonable?
Do we isolate them? Manage them? Silence them? Remove them?
Or do we become curious about what their presence is revealing?
Who decided what belongs in this garden?
What are we trying to cultivate?
What might we be removing simply because we do not recognize its value?
Where are we working so hard to preserve a particular arrangement that we have lost our curiosity about what else could grow there?
Before deciding what to do about the weed, it may be worth examining the decision that made it a weed in the first place.
What does calling it a weed prompt us to do next?
