A gift for the cave dwellers

from a plant ally

I took myself for a walk this morning, past my favorite neighborhood tree, Mimosa. By now, her pink firecracker blooms are long gone and beige seed pods hang like ornaments from her skeletal limbs. I stooped to pick a few up from the ground, thumb caressing them, and a single seed slipped out and fell in my hand. I lay the pods on the ground and kept the seed, tucked in my pocket for the rest of my walk.

I recognize a gift when it comes to me.

All throughout my walk, I reviewed the year we’re leaving behind. It was a hell of a year, collectively and personally, and still it unsettled me how easily I recalled the hellish bits and how blank my memory became when I tried to call forth the sweet ones. I know enough to understand how our brains store pain, stress, grief, trauma or just plain “negative” memories more readily than the happier ones — an evolutionary advantage at one point, perhaps, but no longer so helpful.

But layered on top of this neurological phenomenon was something heavier: even in my happier moments this past year, I could barely feel them. The emotions stored with these memories are blank and my inability to recall them, frightening.

Looking back on this year, there are two words I would use to sum up my emotional state: muted and inaccessible. What I have been able to feel or emotionally access is a pervasive blanket of dread and anxiety. Any feelings of pleasure, affection, happiness or excitement feel as distant as a voice calling underwater through glass — or manufactured, like a mechanical limb.

I have become accustomed to practicing or expressing the correct emotion for the situation or moment rather than feeling it, existing in my own quiet devastation at the loss of a part of me I’ve cherished. Deep feeler, passionate lover — I find myself desperate, scanning my interior landscape for a glimpse of myself and coming up empty.

Something feels very wrong with me. Most people wouldn’t ever know.

I still don’t know, after multiple doctor appointments and attempts to see specialists, an antidepressant and therapy, what “the cause” is of this state I’m in. I’m intimately acquainted with the kind of depression that announces its presence, but this has crept up quietly, sinking in roots and taking hold, as if it’s become a part of me. Most of the time, I think it must be that I’m failing at life. Or that I don’t know how to accept goodness when it comes to me. But some wise part of me knows I can’t reduce myself to these judgments. I’ll know when I know and not a moment sooner.

When I returned from my walk, I pulled out my book of plant allies, Dirt Gems, and looked up Mimosa.

Mimosa’s gifts are those of duality and nuance. For those who feel sunken low in their heart, dark under the eyes, slow and struggling for that spark that drives you forward, Mimosa has the stabilizing force of direction. The fabulous firecracker of the Mimosa flowers move upwards, dancing in the wind, sparkling in your depths. Mimosa will twinkle in the caves of despair, acting as the life raft to your wallowing spirit as you follow their irresistible glow.

I sucked in a breath.

Of course this is the medicine of Mimosa. And even here, at the end of year I’m eager to leave behind, staring ahead at a year I dread, Earth drops a gift in my hand. I can almost feel the spirit of the tree wrapping around my fingers and curling them in around the seed, Here, hold this.

My tiny spark in the darkness of cave.

I have no words of wisdom, no resolutions or intentions, sitting in this cave (in my ghostface socks, which seemed fitting for the close of this year). I simply hope to persist. And maybe one day, more than that, I’ll have a fire again. But for today, I hold this seed and feel its smooth life between my fingers, whispering thanks to Mimosa for a reminder I am accompanied in the dark.