Not Alone

Yesterday, my calendar had thoughts on dandelions. Today, I am preparing to go out and harvest wild herbs, which, of course, include dandelions. My automatic pick for cards then is Soulflower. I often sense patterns, and I could see that dandelion was showing up a lot, but it almost felt too perfectly aligned. As I picked my cards, I would not have been surprised to see dandelion come up, but I also felt some relief when it didn't. The cards were mugwort and yarrow. Immediately, I felt the kinship to dandelion as these plants are harvested wild too. Some pieces snapped into place, and I correlated the sisterhood of plants to the sisterhood of autism. Reading through posts of people like me is such a healing balm. So many times I have said out loud, "Such a relief to know I'm not the only one."

As I began to read the wisdom of mugwort, it sounded like a description of me. Mysterious, speaks in metaphors, dances between understandable and complex, loving yet standoffish. Could it be that mugwort mirrors autism? People often equate darkness with evil, but not all darkness is evil. Out of darkness, all life is born. The darkness of autism or introversion in general is a nourishing darkness, like a shade-loving plant that has leaves too delicate to take the full rays of the sun. As a matter of fact, I just experienced this with my spider plant. I intended to give it healing light, but I was unaware that it was too fragile, and I actually hurt it. It is now recovering in my dimly lit corner. "Mugwort asks you to close your eyes so you can feel your dance and while also dreaming it into reality."

Yarrow represents boundaries; she works as an umbrella or shield against energy drain. If a larger percentage of plants and animals function during the day, does that make the ones that operate at night evil? Of course not. Why, then, are nocturnal people labeled as weird or even bad? There are, of course, people with evil intentions, and often they work in secret, but for those of us who are just regular folks, we need to retreat into solitude to regain strength because life is so exhausting. In that way, darkness is our safe place where no one can judge; we don't have to process information or troubleshoot. This is why we relate better to animals and nature than humans. A kitty doesn't require anything from us, and a little plant doesn't need us to be anything. Learning to protect the boundaries around our need to retreat into a quiet place is critical for us to teach our body to come out of emergency mode and calm the inner anxiety.