On Dandelions and Wishes

By Catherine DiMercurio

The house smells golden in the early morning when the sourdough is baking in the oven and the sun has risen like a fuzzy peach that still remembers August though it is now November and we’ve been plunged into certain kinds of darknesses.

Do you feel like it is hard to hang on sometimes, to things you dream about and want for yourself and the people you love? Are you ever so tired you want to simply sigh and say, fine, I will be a good little worker bee and buzz around working to pay my bills and get further behind and be content with every month where I don’t get further, I just stay the same amount of behind?

I want us to still dream, I want us all to. Guess what? You know why I don’t care about the economy? Because for most people I know, and for me, it doesn’t matter who is president, we’re always struggling anyway, so it makes more sense to care about other things like the people who are dying and where and how and under whose rules and whose orders and whose bombs.

I will also never understand why it is so outlandish to hope that someone who isn’t a man might become president. It is backwards to think that the people who play an integral role in keeping everything together everyday for everyone are somehow not fit to lead.

You know what else? The way we dream changes based on who is in charge. Instead of dreaming about all the ways the dreams of my loved ones might come true now I will just dream about them being safe, and not cornered because of who they love or how they exist in this world. What difference should that make to anyone else?

It feels as though everyone has lost their way in so many ways. We have put too much faith in our leaders; they cannot lead. Who can lead when the whole fight is always about staying in power so you can live to fight another day? When is there ever time and space for fighting for what you believe in and not just who paid to help get you in power?

When I think of “grassroots” I think not of organizing and marching and resisting, I think of loving, I think of the ways the world would be different if we could teach people to care again, about other people, not just here but everywhere, and about the world and how it won’t last at this rate. And maybe we need to reframe the idea all together, we need to think about dandelion roots not grass roots, dandelions and how prolific they are and the good they do all the pollinators, and the perfect little wispy seed clouds we make wishes on. We need to make more wishes and we need to back them up with full hearts.

I wish I had some way to look at this crazy world that made it make sense. Some way of walking through a dark house at night looking for light switches and trying not to run into walls. This our home, these bodies, these neighborhoods, these trees and lakes, this air. All I know how to do is try and keep treating it all with care, and hoping others will do the same. I don’t want to be angry all the time or despairing, though sometimes it feels like there’s no other way to be. But all we can do is keep picking our way forward, finding our footing, keep finding a way to care about one another and this place that is the only one we have.

Did you know that even if only an inch of dandelion root is left in the ground, the root can grow into new plants? Did you know that the root can be used to make a kind of coffee? Let’s be dandelions together and make good things grow everywhere we go.

Love, Cath