Chasing Cattails & Embracing What Grows Uninvited

When I was younger, we used to walk along the railroad tracks near my house. Beside a little stream, cattails grew tall and proud—those reedy plants with a long brown, hot-dog-shaped bloom at the top.

One of our favorite things to do was to grab the stem near the base and push upward with our hands. With one swift motion, the cattail would burst open, releasing a thousand little seeds into the air like tiny parachutes. We watched them float away, mesmerized by their magic.

Recently, my partner shared a memory of his own. He recalled watching his kids joyfully blow on blooming dandelions—the same way many of us did as children. As an adult, he noticed the weeds taking root in his well-tended lawn. His grown-up self—concerned with pre-emergent treatments and pristine grass felt like their play was undoing his efforts.

He laughed as he told the story, lighting up with the tension between those two perspectives. The child at play and the adult trying to control the outcome.

That moment landed for me—deeply.

Weeds are such a powerful metaphor.
The dandelions, the cattails, the unexpected.
The wild things that seem to mess up our carefully curated lives.
They represent the parts of our journey that feel inconvenient, unwanted, or even painful.
But they’re part of the whole.

And when we meet life from the space of unconditioned awareness—of presence—we remember:
The weeds belong.

Yes, trauma, heartbreak, grief… all of it.
The parts we label “hard.”
I hear it all the time—I’ve said it myself:
“But it’s so HARD.”

But maybe it’s not the experience that’s hard.
Maybe it’s resisting the experience that’s hard.
Maybe it’s the belief that the weeds shouldn’t be there that they’re wrong, out of place, something to be eliminated.

What if we stopped fighting the wild?
What if we let the cattails burst and the dandelions fly?
What if we welcomed the “weeds” as part of our soul’s garden?

Then maybe—just maybe—
We could soften.
We could breathe.
We could delight in the beauty of a life not perfectly landscaped, but richly alive.

Because this, my friend, is the wild garden of being human.
And every seed, even the ones we didn’t plant, has something sacred to teach us.