Year of the Dandelion 1975

    My years til now have usually been characterized by disorientation.  I was disoriented, but as long as I was firmly entrenched in a formidable routine, this disorientation was covert.  But when I left home and was finally sprung out of that ordered routine, this tenacious disorganization shot up like Easter dandelions in a late March thaw.  My yard, it was apparent, was chock full of weeds.

    At first, I wore myself out trying to get rid of all this mess.  I was terrified of the unknown, and overwhelmed by my disorganization.  But it was an exercise in  fertility.  The spring of my disorganization flourished.  I gave up, and wallowed in dandelions.

    I had to admit that my weedy disorganization wasn’t hurting anything, even though it dominated my yard of thoughts.  I even began to like the flowers it showered me with.  I began to doubt whether this was, truly, disorganization.  Perhaps it was a message of entirely different character.

    Soon, much to the dismay of Routine, I reveled in my dandelions.  I admired them.  I defended them, though they hardly needed it.  I giggled when some admonished me for being lazy and unproductive.  My disorganization was self-seeding and needed little tending.  I relaxed, unoffended by my critics’ attempts to salvage me.  Summer was full-blown.  I was orienting to the Light.

    I have a confession, though.  The Routine side of me fared poorly.  Nagging, wringing her hands, racking her left brain, she was given uncharacteristically to hysterical fits and miserable behavior, picking fights with my Wild side and quick to misinterpret.  There was sibling static hell a lot of the time.  By late fall, I reconsidered, took drastic measures, and instituted a new routine.  It simply allowed for the weeds.

    Here, at the end of winter, I am satisfied with our initial endeavors.  Possibilities pop up naturally.  The considering routine keeps my rational, logical, autistic routine half, and my emotional, intuitive, neglected and surprising half happy. I’m learning.

    My two littles wander through this garden like 10 year olds, testing the ground here, admiring a young shoot there, and coming to me like a saints prayer, tired, but still curious, at bedtime.

    Sometimes we are haunted by strange, chaotic nightmares, but it becomes easier to elude them by allowing them to disorganize into harmless nothing.  We are no longer afraid of dreams; which is not to say we are not afraid IN them.  We believe in them.  Some dreams are well worth having.

    Winter draws toward Spring again.  The nature of a year’s learning bestows a new name on my thriving disorganization.  It is now called:  BIOLOGY