Spring Journal: Milkweed

The valley woke shrouded in cloud.

Fog hung so thick that treetops vanished into white nothingness. As the sun climbed, the mist began to glow from within—a luminous sea above the valley floor—until golden beams pierced through and scattered it, leaving droplets clinging to new leaves and long grass, falling like whispered rain.

Among these jeweled leaves stood the plants my son and I had transplanted along the walkway, where last year’s downpours had drowned the lavender. Russian sage and catmint might fare better on the slope of the lawn, where the steep valley side drains while still offering delicate purple blooms to beckon bees and butterflies beside the slate path.

With all the pressures of a new girlfriend, busy friendships, and the magnetic pull of screens, my thirteen-year-old son still spent Sunday afternoon helping his wheelchair-bound father get his dirt right. Good kid.

Sunlight caught in his dark hair as he worked, painting copper highlights across his bowed head. His hands moved with surprising care among the roots and stones—the same hands that text with lightning speed and fidget during homework now patient as a gardener three times his age.

As I sat offering directions, he pulled weeds, nestled seedlings into pockets of earth, and smoothed stone mulch with gentle fingers. We talk a lot—always have. This past year, our conversations have sometimes circled my health and dying. I want to prepare him as best I can. I want the knowing to come before the shock.

Some of the plants we pressed into the earth yesterday were milkweed. The plant itself isn’t remarkable to casual eyes—just green stems and sturdy leaves—but it forms the backbone of the monarch butterfly’s existence. I explained how these large, flame-colored butterflies—and their caterpillars, with bodies like tiny black-and-orange accordions—depend entirely on this single plant. Without it, they cannot be.

It astonishes me that monarchs, as weightless as breath and vibrant as autumn, travel between our Pennsylvania valley and distant Mexican mountains, crossing vast continents and wide Gulf waters to gather in winter. These creatures, no heavier than fallen leaves, somehow remember a path they’ve never taken to a place they’ve never seen.

I told him that by planting these shoots, we were setting the conditions for butterflies to materialize—creating the possibility of beauty not yet born. Without these plants, there would be no monarch butterflies—just as there would be no people without air, water, food, and everything else that makes human life possible. Nothing truly stands alone. Everything depends on everything else. Everything flows into everything else, like a stream finding new channels through sand, like breath passing from leaf to lung and back again.

I explained that because everything is merely a combination, recombination, and expression of all else, nothing is ever truly born, and nothing ever truly dies. The color of my eyes, the timbre of my voice, his bright mind, the warm dirt in his hands, his sister’s laugh, the gentle rain, the blowing snow, the dense fog, and sunlit spring evenings have always been here, patiently waiting for the right conditions to express themselves—no less real than what his eyes might see.

Everything around us, including ourselves, flows from one possibility to the next. In this way, nothing exists apart. Nothing can. There is no loss—only change. Before we were born, we existed as our parents, our ancestors, our environment. When we became children, we began to collect and differentiate—to see ourselves as something that exists, a word that literally means “to stand apart.”

But we cannot truly stand apart. That is an illusion. Have you ever lived a single day without the Earth’s water, life’s food, or the leaf’s air? We stand together—with the whole universe. Each part supports all others. And how much closer will we be when our passing bodies and minds can no longer be separate from this universal self?

Finally freed from the illusion of otherness, we return to the vast sea from which we arose—boundless, complete. Like water released from the narrow banks of a stream to rejoin the ocean, our togetherness stretches beyond the horizon’s edge, beyond the grasp of language.

The mind crafts boundaries where none exist. When these artificial lines dissolve, what remains? Only the endless dance of becoming—waves rising and falling back into the ocean. All forms flow into one another, never truly separate, never truly lost.

Fear loosens its grip. These bodies we inhabit, these stories we tell—like morning mist burning away in sunlight. Beneath our fleeting forms pulses an undivided wholeness that cannot be diminished or destroyed.

Such is the quiet truth beneath all change: whatever storms may come, whatever joys or sorrows visit these temporary shapes we wear, the truth remains unshaken. In this unity, all is well. In this unity, all can only ever be well.

In my eagerness to share this gift pulled from the suffering of this strangely contemplative disease, I want to press this truth into the palms of my children’s hands and wrap their precious fingers closed around it tight. But this is impossible. As long as I seem separate, this chasm between our minds can only be crossed by this imperfect and static-filled broadcast of words.

Like the milkweed we planted, when autumn comes, its pods will split and release thousands of silky seeds, white tufts scattered widely by the wind. Rarely do they germinate—only when the conditions are perfect. Some will take root. Most will not. But those that do will bloom into the exact conditions needed for flame-winged monarchs to dance above this valley long after my hands have returned to the soil.

Of course, I know that the thirteen-year-old boy I speak these things to is unlikely to remember exactly what his father was saying as we worked the earth together. Perfectly appropriate for his age, I’m sure his mind wandered during our conversation—to his friends, the wheelies he can pull on his bike, perhaps a girl or two, and the truck he wants when he finally turns sixteen.

Still, if he remembers a sunny late spring afternoon, gardening and talking with his dad, that is more than enough.