Why It Just Keeps Growing Back
Ever heard of goutweed? Terrible name, I know, but that’s just the start of what’s bothersome about this plant. The last house I lived in, goutweed was everywhere. The previous owners thought it was pretty, and they gleefully found it homes all over the property. It was kind of pretty, I guess, and in the wild, it wouldn’t demand attention. In a suburban backyard, it was invasive, nothing short of an angry, green bully. That pretty wee plant got into and took over every available nook and cranny of both our front and back yard. It showed up at the very beginning of spring and choked out the stuff I really wanted to grow there. I spent hours and hours in the summer, ripping it out in handfuls, only to see it rushing back in within days. I swear sometimes I could see it re-blossoming as I watched, sweaty and frustrated. Our neighbours had to deal with it as well, and were gracious enough to not blame us for starting this this leafy scourge.
Experts told us that the only way to get rid of it was to torch the yard (literally) and start over, and even then, it might still come back. Goutweed, as it turns out, is an evolutionary marvel, an invasive species. It thrives in shade and is drought tolerant. It’s the first out of the gate when the frost melts. It’s happy to hide out underground for a spell, fooling us into thinking it’s gone. Even one or two little shoots of this beast can easily lead to a future siege. Planting it anywhere means a commitment to either ripping it up on a regular basis, or else giving in and having it take over completely.
If Audrey 2 of Little Shop of Horrors had been goutweed, it would have been a very short musical about a very swift takeover of the planet.
Okay, here endeth the botany lesson, and beginneth the metaphor: Goutweed is an awful lot like hate.
Like goutweed, hate can start out looking innocuous. Maybe it even looks “pretty” to some, depending on their motives and aspirations.
Like goutweed, hate thrives wherever and whenever you let it. It creeps over and starves out anything else struggling to grow around it, starting with, but not limiting itself to the most vulnerable in the vicinity.
Like goutweed, hate survives and even thrives in the dark. It doesn’t go away or get weaker because we can’t (or don’t want to) see it. It sits there and waits for any opportune time to return with a vengeance.
Most importantly, like goutweed, hate can’t be controlled without dedicated and ongoing efforts to yank it out. There is no half-way, “I’ll just pull up a little here and there” solution to hate. It’s an all-or-nothing deal. When we pick and choose which instances of hate we allow to grow, and which we refuse to tolerate, it comes back, often worse than before. Every patch of hate we choose to just leave for later thrives at the cost of something or someone else. Deliberately sowing more hate is despicable and inhuman, but so is shrugging it off and assuming it isn’t our job to do something about what’s already creeping up. And yes, it’s an ongoing process, one we’ll have to teach to those who come after us, lest they find themselves overcome with it.
I’ll admit that on many occasions, when we lived on that goutweed-infested property, I just got tired of dealing with it. My back and arms got sore, and there were times when I figured it was a losing battle and I couldn’t bring myself to get out there and at least try to thin the herd, even just a little. Eventually we moved, and I got to do the “well it’s not in my back yard” thing. Maybe the new owners of our previous house did something about it, and maybe they didn’t, but it was no longer my problem. How lucky I was to not have to be mindful and motivated (oh, the cringe), to be in a position to just shrug it off, even when I knew it was probably just one bad transplant away from popping up in my new garden.
We’re in the midst of what feels like an overgrowth of hate right now. Some of it is a fresh crop, with some horrific, newly-bred varieties, and some of it is old shoots that were just never dug up and disposed of. Some of it has been deliberately cultivated, and some of it just snuck in while we were looking elsewhere. All of it is keeping us from nurturing other things, more important, unifying, healing things, the things we need in order to deal with the multitude of heartbreaks the world currently has in store for us. It’s a relatively small, smooshed-together garden we share, and there’s no “my back yard” or “your backyard” right now. What blocks out the light for others will eventually do the same for us, maybe even more so.
As Joni Mitchell once said “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Put on some gloves and start weeding. No more excuses.