Beloved friends,
Happy Beltane to you, happy holy-day-of-peak-spring!
All of my life I have loved dandelions. As a child I made crowns from the cheerful yellow flowers and wished on the seeds as I blew them to the wind. As young adult I learned to cherish the leaves and the roots as excellent sources of nutrients. In my middle age, having learned the pleasure of bitterness, I appreciate their flavor. Dandelions grace the altar in my temple, and the story of that is sweet. I've been getting a lot of questions about the dandelion garlands lately, and I'm finding in this time where there is so much cruelty and chaos afoot, moments where we can cherish personal pleasure feel particularly dear, so my intention for today, darlings, is to share some pleasure with you.
The story of the dandelions on my altar begins in my mother's kitchen. A few years ago during a visit I noticed that she had dandelion puffs on a thread above her sink. This blew my mind: how was she DOING that? How did they get there, and how did they last? It seemed a very my-mama thing; she's always making incredible things and acting very casual about it. When her best friend died, my mama cut the long leaves of some plants from her friend's garden, dried them, and learned to weave them into tiny baskets. There's one on the altar in my bedroom. And there's a tray made of pine needles on the table beside me which she made as well. She sewed my clothes when I was small. She's done embroidery, quilting, pressed flower pictures, a German paper-cutting art called scherenschnitte; I could go on and on. She insists she's "just a crafter", but I see her as a brilliant practitioner of folk arts.
My mama was married when she was 18 and had me when she was 20, so I've gotten to see a tremendous amount of her growing, for which I'm grateful. She's an inspiration to me in learning, healing, and creating. She's always happy to share about what she's making, so when I marveled at her dandelion garlands, she told me how to make them. It was late autumn, though, too late for me to try. The following spring she remembered and sent me the instructions, which I'm happy to share with you today.
To prepare to share this with you I walked out to the meadow that lies between my home and the one next door. What joy I find in this meadow in springtime!
The meadow gets eaten by deer in the mornings and the afternoons, and there are wild rabbits dashing about in the grasses. A few weeks ago the neighbors saw a bobcat there, and once in a while someone will glimpse a mountain lion in the deeper forest.
To make a dandelion garland, you simply need to pick dandelions at the time, which is this moment:
after their yellow blossom and before their big puffball. You simply cut the heads when the flowers are closed with white tips showing and thread them onto string with a needle. Within a few hours they will open. They'll last that way indefinitely unless something touches them or a strong wind hits them. They tend to open in the heat of the day, so a good way to do this is to hunt for the closed white blossoms in the morning.
From left to right: my garlands just after threading, the next morning, and a year later.
I've been writing this from the loveseat in the parlor. Beside me is a window. Outside of that window as I've been writing, a Douglas Squirrel has been harvesting buds from a camellia tree, carrying them up onto the deck, and eating some part of them, which leaves the deck scattered with petals. Between blossoms, they stop to drink from the birdfeeder.
May your spring be filled with blossom, friends. May you feel connected with the more-than-human life of the Earth. May this bring us comfort in our grief and lift us higher in our joy.
Resilience
We are Not Alone
Australian researchers have confirmed that lyrebirds who live in the eucaluyptus forests of south-eastern Australia farm their food: they arrange matter on the forest floor in ways that make good habitat to fatten up the insects and worms they like to eat. I love this natural form of farming, which makes the small creatures thrive so that they are more nourishing for the birds and for the forest itself. An interdependence in which there is benefit in many directions.
Urban Forage
I sometimes hear folks who live in cities sound wistful when I speak of foraging seaweed or nettles. While it is certainly easier to forest in places with more wildness, there are dedicated foragers in all environments, and they tend to be folks devoted so sharing. Falling Fruit is a map that shows edible food that can be foraged in cities all over the world.
Rest
In tender times we are more often called to rest. I hope that this outstanding article exploring several different studies about the benefits of napping for our brains might help you give yourself permission to nap when time allows. The headline that caught my eye here was a correlation between napping and a 6.5 year difference in brain aging. We're still sorting out the causality on this, but it seems that napping is as healthy as it is sweet!
Zooming Out
This is Io. Isn't she beautiful? Io is one of the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter is the Roman equivalent of the Greek God Zeus, and Jupiter's moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are named for three women and a man who were lovers of Zeus.
Resistance
"Our protests, posts, boycotts are part of a movement. We're throwing straws on the camel's back. Not knowing how much straw it's going to take doesn't mean we stop." - Aamir Hussain
"When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system." - Ilya Prigogine, Belgian chemist. Thanks to Kate