Dandelions are a crop. That’s according to Ross Gay, avid gardener, poet, and author of The Book of Delights. He loves the taste of dandelion greens, and he turns our perception of them upside down. ‘Weed’ is not part of his vocabulary.
Dandelion
In choosing a dandelion as the symbol for Transition Yoga, I had a few thoughts. My first were childhood memories of making a wish and blowing dandelion seeds in the first carefree days of summer, sitting on the lawn and watching the white parachute seeds float on the warm air. I had a sense of freedom and pure joy at the sight of a dandelion.
But what if people interpreted the dandelion as a weed to be pulled or a person who’s ‘gone to seed’? Maybe some would see it that way.
Resilience
Dandelion imagery is rich and varied. Think how resilient dandelions are. They grow in all kinds of environments. No matter what tools, chemical sprays, or dark covers we throw over them, dandelions find ways to survive. They sprout brilliant yellow across lawns, fields, and hillsides. They break through cement.
The white puffs are just as beautiful and ephemeral, with seeds that travel as far as 100 kilometres, ensuring future crops of dandelions, into the next season and the next and the next. The seeds are also among the first to feed important pollinators in springtime. Bees, birds, and butterflies are the beneficiaries, which in turn support the growth and survival of many more varieties of plant and animal life.
Intention
In yoga, the metaphor of a seed is often used to describe an intention, something we wish to germinate and grow into being. We set an intention at the beginning of a practice or meditation. The Sanskrit word for intention is sankalpa, which translates as a vow to your highest self. The seed of our intention encourages the growth of our better selves. We become what we say we are.
I return to my first thoughts of dandelions: childhood, a wish, joyfulness, and seeds in flight. The dandelion, a resilient and regenerative crop, is a symbol so well aligned with my intentions for Transition Yoga. Gentle and accessible movement, conscious breathing and meditation, to offer strength, resilience, comfort, and joy to elders and people nearing the end of life. Yoga may not cure the seasons of life and death, but it can bring about a profound sense of healing.
Healing
Ross Gay explains beautifully how healing happens in natural communities. Whether we are talking about trees in a forest or people in a neighbourhood, the support given and received by community members is at the root of joy. This excerpt from The Book of Delights is long, something to chew on slowly, like a dandelion salad:
“In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused. By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms. Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”