Anger, Sorrow, & a New Path

I live on a small, quarter acre of land that is town-locked in a community of perfectly manicured lawn wastelands. There’s a bike path with a small creek that my son and I enjoyed spending time with. He would throw stones as I cleaned up broken glass and litter and talked to the plants. Beside that creek I met Peppergrass and Wild Basil for the first time, both very tasty! I was excited for them to go to seed, to gather those seeds, and to attempt to plant them on my homestead and add their delicious flavor to my lawn pesto next Spring. 

One day my partner and I brought our son to the creek together. We had collected stones along the way, showing our son the niftiness of the pockets in his shorts. When we got there I felt a wave of anxiety, but didn’t know where it came from. 

“What’s this shit sprayed on the plants?” my partner asked and I looked, horrified, at the Peppergrass he pointed to. 

It was covered in a green film. As I looked around I realized that everything was. The trails of the sprayer lined all the bricks of the bridge wall, all over the rocky bank beside the creek, and seemed to be sprayed directly in the face of my plant friends. 

“We need to leave. Now,” I said, but my partner didn’t want to disappoint our son. He wanted to throw the rocks he collected into the creek and so we held him over the water and allowed him time to throw his rocks. And then we quickly retreated, our son crying, not understanding why we couldn’t spend more time at the creek. 

I was devastated, crying then as I still cry now writing this. My head pounded with a migraine for the rest of the day.  

I went on the Nextdoor app (a social media for neighborhoods) and posted: “Can anyone tell me who is responsible for spraying (what I believe to be) pesticide all over *** Creek and if there is a way I could petition them not to do that?”

The responses only made me feel more devastated. All but one person ignored my actual questions completely, instead all correcting me that the green stuff is probably just grass seed, not pesticide.

Mistakenly, I retorted that it wasn’t grass seed. Grass seed wouldn’t be sprayed in between bricks or directly in the face of other plants. One person accused me of “not liking the answers [I got] because it doesn’t fit the agenda [I] had planned in the first place.” With this salt added to my wounds, I tucked my tail between my legs and silenced the Nextdoor app. 

One person did note that it might have been glyphosate, the chemical name for Roundup, that may have been sprayed to prevent a Knotweed population. There was one Knotweed plant by the creek that I had met and thought about pulling up myself to prevent his invasive spread. Something told me not to harvest anything by this creek though, and I now understand the warning I am glad I heeded. 

It was in the days that followed that my partner bought me Dana Driscoll’s book “Land Healing” and I am so grateful. When I got into herbalism I thought my path was introducing plant medicine to humans and helping them heal themselves with this gift. But after this experience, I want very little to do with human healing. At the moment, I’m having a hard time believing that they even deserve forgiveness and healing after all the harm and illness they’ve brought to the land… I used to tell myself that most people are not conscious of what they are doing, but so many people are aware that what they are doing is harmful to the land (even if they can’t see the spirits), but they do it anyway for the sake of their own personal laziness, comfort, financial profit, and consumerism. People I love and respect even… And that’s something I know I will have to reconcile in the future, as I don’t want to hold on to this anger and bitterness forever. But as of right now, it’s pointing me down a new path.