Why all the dandelions?

Permission to be yourself in any climate.

When I was in university I took an Irish Literature course, and frankly it went well beyond that, I dreamed of moving to Ireland and studying at Trinity College. (I didn’t and that also was a good story). But in that first course I encountered some of my favourite words in literature from the poets I met there. Paul Durkin and “Making Love in the High-speed Carwash”. Yeats’s voice taking me to the “Lake Isle of Innisfree” and bee-loud glades. The archeology of words that Seamus Heaney so brilliantly deployed in a simple thatch. These poems were some of the first times I truly fell in love and could not be moved off of it. Moments where my taste became my own.

One of the most impactful lines these decades on came from Patrick Kavanagh’s Spraying the Potatoes:

I recognized myself so profoundly in that line. May we all be dandelions! To commit to the full expression of ourselves, our gifts, and not be reliant on love or approval from others to allow it. May we be resilient and beloved by children. May people at rest run their fingers through the grass and find us to make chains for lovers and a wish on our seeds.

I was once in a women’s group setting where I said this line out loud and all everyone heard was ‘unloved” and tried to shush me and move me on to something more cheerful to represent myself. Their brains did not hear the “except for by themselves” that comes after unloved. Unloved wasn’t a criticism by Kavanagh, it was full of admiration for the generativeness and persistence of the dandelion amidst a world intent on eradicating it—including himself with his potato spray. I think of this poem every time I see a dandelion.

I remember I want to be someone who shows my beautiful heart regardless of my surroundings and others’ intentions. I want to find a way to grow and flower and feed and seed forward even when it is hard. I want to support others who are doing the same.

That is the kind of work I believe we are being called to do now. That’s why I named my work Resiliency Club and feature this disregarded contributor of beauty and joy as its symbol.

If you want help showing your heart I’m here.

Susie

The poem in its entirety:

Spraying the Potatoes

The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland in July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.

The flocks of green potato stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr’s Pinks in frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white.

And over that potato-field
A lazy veil of woven sun,
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unloved hearts to everyone.

And I was there with a knapsack sprayer
On the barrel’s edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.

The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.
An old man came through a cornfield
Remembering his youth and some Ruth he knew

He turned my way. ‘God further the work’.
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato drills.
He said: ‘You are bound to have good ones there’.

We talked and our talk was a theme of kings,
A theme for strings. He hunkered down
In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses,
The old man dies in the young girl’s frown.

And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.

Patrick Kavanagh 1904 – 1967