Freesia

When I was living in Germany, studying at Heidelberg University, I was suffering from anorexia, undiagnosed. My family was experiencing the trauma of my father’s illness, and we were all doing the best we could to survive. I didn’t fully understand yet how dangerous this time was, but I did begin trying to eat well. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but inching forward to wellness, it was very hard, and every tiny success was huge.

I remember I had a handwritten list taped to the back of my closet door in my small two-person dorm room in Neuenheimer Feld, to keep track of showering, to make sure I did regularly. I was living with high-functioning depression, also undiagnosed, and it was exhausting. In spite of these deeply painful and confusing experiences, there were also moments of joy. It was my first time in another country, I was there on a meager but bountiful to me Rotary Graduate Scholarship, and I was trying to learn German, which made me very happy. I had met the Buschbecks in Heidelberg, and they took took me in, and also I came to know the Schusters of Ernsbach, my sweet roommate’s family.

That’s how I came to be in Ernsbach visiting Gundi’s family, who also took me in. I’m forever grateful. They treated me with great kindness. They cooked and baked the most delicious food like roast potatoes, delicate and delicious feldsalat or Rapunzel Lettuce, the very best homemade French onion soup, rabbit, Spätzle, and more, including Lebkuchen. I healed eating their food in the warm-hearted home nestled in Baden-Württemberg.

One day, to welcome the international student and her sister’s roommate, Marianne walked across the village with a fresh bouquet of multicolored freesia, to her parents’ house. This was all happening in German, so I was translating in my mind as she told me what they were. I was still in that stage of translating what was said to me rather than just hearing and understanding, which thankfully came later, owing to kind Germans living with my then halting German. I have an image of accepting Marianne’s flowers outside, for some reason. I remember Ernsbach as a greening place of beech, hornbeams, sycamores, maples, ash, oaks, birch, and of course deep emerald spruce and fir trees, and in my memory I am standing there accepting this extraordinary and thoughtful gift, surrounded by friendly trees, and I couldn’t believe how beautiful they smelled. I’d never heard of, much less smelled and seen freesia before.

Wood sorrel, however, is what I seem to grow best in California. It lines the spaces under the watermelon-pink crepe myrtle trees in front of our home. We keep trying to make that space grow succulents, Sean and I have planted and tended many there, and they do grow, but wild wood sorrel with its tall yellow blooms grows best there.

But someone who lived here before us left one yellow freesia under the holly tree next to our house and beside the geranium bush. Every spring this lone freesia is the first to bloom, and I developed a ritual where I would go over every day when I go out and bend to smell its perfume and spend a few moments just marveling at it, and remembering.

But this year it didn’t seem to bloom. I was extra busy teaching, having conversations with students, marking their papers and other work, attending faculty meetings at UC Berkeley, etc., and also having very many wonderful conversations with my kind, warm-hearted, and brilliant friends at the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), founded by the Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher Richard Rohr. Since the fall I have been participating as an affiliate faculty along with Randy Woodley and others, making the Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course. Conversations with Randy, Barbara Holmes, Brian McLaren, Drew Jackson, Gigi Ross, Jennifer Tompos, Jim Finley, Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, Richard Rohr, and others have been a course in itself, and a healing through belonging and community.

So the very edible wood sorrel aka weeds outgrew my interest in or time for pulling them. They were approaching knee height when I stopped to fully realize how much I missed my freesia. Every spring this freesia’s delicate, bright yellow fragrance sparkles under the holly’s red berries and spiny green leaves and near the spicy- and green-smelling geranium with its red blooms. We were also left pearl calla lilies in this small patch. I welcome these every spring as they shoot up. A couple of years ago, I sowed orange California poppies. Just recently, the holly’s small cream-colored flowers attracted bees, that yearly ritual I never miss. I watch them from our front step or out the little window there, so focused on their nectar gathering and nothing else. I’ve worked the soil underneath that small tree, as my mother taught me, and I love watching everything sprout, grow tall, bloom, and then fade. The stages are all very beautiful to me.

Often when I gaze on our holly, I think how I remembered not long ago that Acevedo means “a holly grove,” the “holly” is azevo and the “grove” is edo. It’s a surname that originates in Portugal and through colonization to Spain and from there, for my family, to Cuba. I say “remembered” because my best friend tells me that she told me that years ago. I believe her.

So yesterday I was out in that patch under the holly, pulling wood sorrel. Again, I have to say it again, because it has been so remarkable. The rains this season made everything grow faster than imaginable. And thankfully pulling weeds with such a thoroughly soaked ground is like cutting through fudge, smooth, easy, delicious. They come right up.

I learn so much when bending to the soil. Just the smell of earth makes me wiser, I think. I mean it reminds me of my place in all of this, that interconnectedness. Bending to pull up weeds or dig up those bulbs that are outside of the enclosure and moving them to a new spot where they can grow without fear of the lawnmower’s blades—that bending feels like I’m bowing to earth, thank you, thank you.

I learn so much also because the wood sorrel and the orange poppies are totally intertwined. I have to be careful not to pull up poppies with the wood sorrel, and sometimes, even being careful, I do. As I’m doing that, bending and with gloves on trying to find only the wood sorrel to pull up, I think of the wise parable of the weeds from Matthew 13:24 and on. It seems to teach the mind and heart of compassion. First of all, wood sorrel has worth, you can eat it for one thing, and it is beautiful too, and who is to say what is weed and what is flower? In this parable Jesus says to let the weeds and the wheat grow together. It reminds me to be compassionate first with myself, for the wood sorrel and poppies intertwined within me, along with the star thistle, prickly lettuce, and hedgeparsley with its stick-to-your-socks seeds.

I grew up with the eradicate your prickly lettuce mentality. Know the good and fight and rid yourself of the bad. This grew the perfectionist mindset in me.

This teaching from Jesus doesn’t mean it’s okay to be unkind to my self or others, or that it’s okay to be thoughtless or selfish, but it does say that I’m a mixture of wood sorrel, prickly lettuce, orange poppies, hedgeparsley, and star thistle. I love my self with my mix of faults and kindness just as I love others with theirs.

I also have to relearn to notice and appreciate my inner freesia. This spring, again, the wood sorrel, rain-fed, shot up, juicy and strong and abundant, and the wonderful conversations I was having with so many students and friends, all my teachers, meant that I thought that my freesia had not bloomed. It was mostly the green and yellow of wood sorrel. But yesterday—voila!—as I was pulling up wood sorrel underneath the holly tree, there it was, the blooming as always bright yellow freesia, hidden underneath the abundant weeds. It has ten or more flowers already. It is heavy with them. As I pulled weeds, I had thought I kept smelling its uniquely wonderful fragrance but had told myself I was imagining things. See how you can catch the scent of goodness and kindness even if you can’t see it? My Self said to my self. So happy to be reunited with my freesia and to see it again, I carefully cleared out the space around it to give it breathing room, and I breathed in deep the aromatic earth.

I thought how my mother recently turned 87 and how fortunate we are to still have her with us. She is a gardener and I always feel close to her when I smell dirt and touch it. Because she is so humble, she is exceptionally strong and smart without advertisement, in that it’s-not-much-noticed way. She somehow nursed my father for three years through his dementia and death, she has had two bouts of Covid, and she was hospitalized for pneumonia, and nearly died two years ago. My brother and his family live with her right now, and she enjoys the extended family arrangement.

I thought as I dug and positioned a decorative stone under the freesia, to prop it up and also so I don’t lose it again, how Marianne in Ernsbach introduced me to these. Not too many years after she walked her bouquet so thoughtfully across that village to gift it to me, welcoming the stranger, she died in a tragic accident, very young, too young. It was unthinkable. I thank you, Marianne, every time I see and smell freesia anywhere, and especially the one in my front yard. Thank you.

Recently I had an experience of release that is the result of years of therapy, years of reading psychology deeply and also spiritually wise works, years of writing poetry and of translating spiritual texts like Cloud and Presence, years of steeping in scripture and wise works, recent conversations with my CAC friends, and years of kindness and love from my family and friends, all beloveds. That includes Tao our cat, and Lucky who lived to be 20, our cat friend before Tao. I let go of much recently, and I found the freesia in me, and the tears came and since I was lying in bed at the time, they ran into my ears, and these were good tears.

Though I have not been depressed for many years now, and my doctor says it is in “remission,” and I’m grateful, and though I know I am whole, I am also healing. This release recently was a major part of that ongoing healing.

I am grateful for freesia, within me and in my front garden, for freedom to be self-compassionate and others-compassionate and to grow and heal, and for the weeds.