Welcome to Yield Guide, a project inspired by field guides, plant identification, art history, close reading, and deep listening. In each letter, I’ll be sharing one meandering observation on a single subject. The first observation of the month will always be free; a second will be available to paid subscribers. It’s my hope that this project will be an exercise in slow and deliberate looking, and also in returning to writing as a site of community, experimentation, and pleasure. Thank you for reading, and for supporting this practice.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in meadows lately.
There’s the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, which years ago I learned was man-designed to mimic nature’s rolling hills and valleys, with hexagonal-stoned pathways set below the eye line, so that figures walking through the park appear as if they’re gliding. And up in Bennington, Vermont, where I have spent the last two Junes, the small college campus—clusters of barns and colonials and low, sixties-style concrete construction—suddenly yields to a vast, open meadow. The meadow is huge, with its own vanishing point. In the middle distance, trees; in the far distance, the green mountains. Farther still the soft white bodies of clouds, buttery streaks that seem to dissolve into a blue sky. Groundskeepers have cut a path through the meadow, and on either side the tall grass reaches mid-thigh.
It’s startling to encounter such a large and empty space, especially under the auspices of an institution. One imagines development; one imagines dormitories. The first time I really walked past the meadow, on my way to the little cottage where I was housed for a fellowship, I wanted to know why it was so far, why it was so inconvenient, why I had to walk ten minutes alone in the dark. But I might as well have asked why I had to walk listening to the sound of crickets, and the night noises of frogs, and the velvety swoop of owls hunting small live things; I might as well have asked why I was being forced to appreciate the fireflies. For in the meadow, at night, the fireflies come out, droves of them, a silent chorus of luminescent greens and yellows. Once, on Quora, I saw that someone had asked where fireflies go during the day. Another contributor wrote back, the fireflies are always there, but you probably don’t notice them because they are not lit up and they are sleeping :)
Because they are sleeping. What I mean to say is that there is life in the meadow, that though it is devoid of human presence it is not a lifeless place. The meadow is teeming, vibrating with sense and intellect. There are buttercups, wild white roses, bell-shaped comfrey flowers and the common self-heal; there are ox-eye daisies and bird’s-foot trefoil and milkweed and the bees that belove it and there, in great waves of coruscating pale purple, is Knautia arvensis, also known as field scabious, named so because it was used to treat afflictions of the skin, and which remains a wild, perennially blooming flower.
This observation owes a debt to Katy Simpson Smith, whose book The Weeds, is a celebration of the marginal plant, the trodden-upon weed, the unbloomed flower. It is also a book about scientific research and patriarchy. Katy gave a reading in which she pulled from all the species in bloom in the Bennington meadow, and in which she identified Knautia, those swathes of purple flowers, the flower I most associate with Vermont, which is also the place where, in my heart, poetry was reborn.
During the second year of the pandemic—I have written of this already—I got really into nature identification. That is, the names of plants, insects, fungi, and birds. There is nothing like knowing the name of a species—a weed, a warbler—to populate a hitherto unfamiliar space, to bring color and richness to what was before merely blue, or brown, or green. Even the names of the most ubiquitous groundcovers give texture to a lawn: chickweed, pineapple weed, shepherd’s purse. Red clover, green clover. It is an act of opening to learn what something is called. The thing you open to is the world. The world thus opens to you. For some reason, last summer, my plant identification app couldn’t identify the purple flower that sat like a soft haze over the grassy fields, offering suggestions that were either too vague (dicots?) or too improbable (wild chives?); it wasn’t until Katy’s reading that I learned: Knautia.
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The flowers, on hairy stems, fit neatly between the fingers of one hand. Each flower is in fact many small florets, the pale purple petals sometimes tending toward a gradient, pinker and lighter in the center of the flower. There is something radiant about the field scabious. It seems to have emerged out of pure sunlight. Its colors are precisely dawn-esque; they’re giving Titian, O’Keeffe, highlighter palette, celestial. When I see an individual field scabious flower I want to cry because it is so beautiful. Because I have never seen an individual field scabious, only hundreds and thousands together, I am always weeping in the meadow. Because its florets are rich in nectar, it attracts insects, among them the firefly, which lazily bobs and drifts, flashing phosphorescence above the wild plants of the meadow.
What I mean to say is that there are no fireflies without meadow or forest, and no meadow without Knautia, and no field scabious without the other field flowers and grasses and pollinators. And without pollinators there is no fruit, and without fruit there is no sweetness, and so it is that in every living thing we see the mark of every other living thing.
Which reminds me.
In April, back stateside from a long trip overseas, I spent four days at a Zen temple. In the mornings we sat zazen and chanted; in the work periods I knelt in the garden and planted beets and potatoes; and in the two free hours we had each afternoon, I read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s book, The Other Shore, his translation of and commentary on the Heart Sutra. There is a term Thầy uses, interbeing, which describes our deep connection to all other beings, inanimate and animate, in the universe. As a species, we are not independent but in fact helplessly dependent on other creatures. Just as the printed sheet of paper contains the life of the logger as well as the tree, just as these words that you’re reading come not only from my fingertips but the numerous hands that have fed, clothed, and housed me, I am no different from the Knautia. I am no different from the firefly weaving through the dark. My life is just as interdependent and finite.
After Katy’s reading, I walked more slowly. I wasn’t afraid of the darkness or the meadow, for I knew what it was made of, and that we were neighbors. At night, the frogs in the pond were loud and made strange noises. Sometimes it felt as though they were speaking to each other. I was never alone. I could never be.
I’ve been learning the names of plants and birds for a while now. It slows me sometimes, walking through Prospect Park, anxious to finish my loop before the sun fully goes down. I’m constantly stopping to take pictures, unbeautiful ones, the only importance the centering of the subject in the frame. I will write more about those observations in this series, and observations of other things: poems, songs, paintings. For now, in this first letter, I want to thank you for spending this time with these thoughts. For yielding.
Till soon,
LP