A Weed is a Plant

I have this thing for dandelions.  You could call it a weakness.  I love them.  I mean, think about how beautiful they are.  Take a moment, get on your hands and knees and really take a look at these amazing golden bursts of sunshine scattered throughout your yard.  It doesn’t stop there.  When they die, they don’t wither or turn brown and ugly.  They transform; metamorphosis into ethereal lunar orbs with the fragility of butterfly wings gently suspended over springtime grass.  If you’re careful and very gentle, you can pick them, hold them to your face and softly blow on the orb.  The dandelion transforms once again into hundreds of floating stars shooting out from a single galaxy of creation.  From sun to moon to stars, all in about a weeks time.  There is only one problem.  They’re a weed.  They spread like mad.  If they were hard to grow we would pot them, cultivate them, cherish them and sell them for an arm and a leg.  We would ask our friends for cuttings so we could cultivate our own dandelions; we would call nurseries to see if new dandelions had come in.  But we don’t do that.  Why?  Because they’re a weed.  We’ve made a judgment call and so something beautiful is now considered a pest.

I think I got this view from old man Mortensen who lived in my neighborhood.  He was a nice old man who lived with his kind old wife.  I have very few memories of Mr. Mortensen, but one crystal clear memory is him talking to me about what plants were to be pulled up and what plants were to be left.  I remember it because of his seriousness.  The gravity of it all.  What should be classified as a weed?  It seems silly now but at the time I knew this was very important to him.  I thought it was all silliness.  I was young and impatient.  I just wanted to be shown what plants needed pulling and which ones needed leaving.  I had no need of philosophy.  But this would come to be the first piece of serious thought I encountered outside my own home.  “A weed is a plant that grows in the wrong place.”  That simple.  All plants are plants but some we classify as weeds because they are in the wrong place.  They are detrimental to the surrounding plants.  Mr. Mortensen said he would give me “two bits” if I could remember that phrase when I came to weed next week.  I later asked my mom what two bits was.  Turns out it is a quarter.  A serious amount to a kid in the 70’s.  So I remembered the phrase.  A weed is a plant that grows in the wrong place.  I could remember that.

I can’t describe or explain how often I repeat that phrase in my head.  How many times I think about what it meant.  I came to absorb the idea Mr. Mortensen introduced to me.  It’s become a modern parable for me – it’s a way I look at problems and how I view people.  The parable is important for two reasons.  The first reason is the phrase just makes sense.  Labels are important and often we believe the labels given us.  Labels can make us, in part, who we are.  The other, more important, reason I think about Mr. Mortensen and his weeds all the time is they are now my weeds.  I don’t mean I own a house with my own weeds.  I mean I own Mr. Mortensen’s actual house.  In a strange twist of fate, I came to own the very house I used to weed.  So I now live ten houses from my parents.  Ten houses from where I grew up.  The very neighborhood that shaped me now shapes my children.  The weeds I used to pull are now pulled by my kids.  I continue to tell them the phrase – a weed is a plant that grows in the wrong place.

The topic came up anew, literally, the other day when I was out in the yard admiring the fading spring tulips and emerging summer plants; anticipating beauty that would come up weeks from now.  So as we were admiring the plants, I pointed out one plant I didn’t recognize.  It was already fairly large with gorgeous lacy leaves that looked almost fern-like.  I commented on how pretty is was and asked my wife if she knew what plant it was.  She thought it was a just a weed.  She stuttered on the phrase a bit because she knows it’s a pet peeve of mine.  I stood there a moment, looking at my new weed, and nodded.  We both knew what was coming.  “Let’s leave it.”  I suggested.  My wife nodded and rolled her eyes a bit, knowing disagreement would only encourage another retelling of the story of wise old Mr. Mortensen and how I used to pull weeds for him.  You see, I twist the parable a bit; sometimes I get weeds and people mixed up.  Maybe weeds and people need to be given more time, more space or a different place to grow up.  Mortensen wouldn’t have agreed, he would have just pulled it.

So for a couple of weeks, I watched this plant grow.  My wife was right.  It wasn’t intended for our flowerbed.  It is a weed.  Its leaves haven’t gotten any uglier.  In fact, it has gotten increasingly beautiful.  The leaves are still these fragile looking, lacy constructions that look like faerie wings.  Now it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the flowerbed.  It’s almost two feet high now and flowers are starting to bloom.  It’s going to be beautiful.  But it’s definitely taking space other plants need to survive; it’s hogging their air and blocking their sun.  Not good.

Mortensen would have told me to pull it.  But I’ve seen people be given another chance and it’s worked out great.  Maybe it’s true for this weed too.  He was a wise man, Mr. Mortensen.  It wasn’t until I moved into his home and started receiving his mail that I realized who he really was.  He was a doctor, a Ph.D.  He had advanced degrees when most folks his age were only graduating from high school.  The scholarly journals that came to his house, that I now lived in, shouldn’t have surprised me.  They were journals on agriculture.  Turns out old man Mortensen had a Ph.D. in Farming and Agriculture.  He thought a lot about plants, their place in the world, and how to help them grow better.  It wasn’t just idle chatter to him, it was truth.

So the other morning I dressed in shirt and tie, ready for some important visitors to my school, and I saw this monstrous beauty of a plant in my flowerbed.  I thought of Mr. Mortensen and how I use his saying to think about people.  We were nervous for the visitors to come.  You never know what’s going to happen at my school.  We have a bunch of kids who didn’t make it other places.  These kids, when in normal classrooms, take up a lot of time and energy with their attitude and actions.  They made it difficult for the rest of the students to get the education they need.  All my students are in state’s custody.  The state has taken over their lives and decided who their guardians are and who will educate them.  The heads of all the state agencies were coming to see our school, see the kids they are responsible for, and see what kind of education they are getting.

When they entered my classroom I was deeply in the middle of teaching; throwing out questions and encouraging answers.  Trying to be my regular teaching self – only with a tie.  The tour guide kindly interrupted, introduced me to the visiting guests and, out of the blue, asked me what I liked best about where I work.  It took me by surprise.  All my brainpower had been invested in getting out the content and on classroom management.  Sometimes my kids act out a bit, and today wasn’t a day where that acting out would do us any good.  So the question, “What’s one thing you like about teaching at this school,” really took me by surprise.  As I looked around my room, at these students that hadn’t succeeded elsewhere, it dawned on me.  Mr. Mortensen.

Most of students’ faces looked hard and unemotional.  But I saw beyond that to what I knew about their lives.  A seventeen-year-old mother whose two children had just been taken away by the courts.  A drug dealer who sampled so much of his own product he cannot really form full thoughts or sentences any more.  A kid beaten by his father with an electrical cord cut from an unused vacuum.  A gang member who never knew a father raised by the local crew and by violence.  A girl who had known only the affections of influential older men in her neighborhood and felt honored by their attention.  And a kid who finally found a foster dad who loved him, but who was now dying from a brain tumor.  These were the faces I saw.  These are my kids.  This is my classroom.  I knew my answer.  I knew what I loved about where I work.  It’s about perspective.

I smiled and looked at my visitors and said something like this.  “I love this school because it gives those who might not have succeeded in another school another opportunity to succeed.  A different environment.  Somewhere where teachers know how to deal with their unique personalities and challenges.  Somewhere where they see beyond actions and attitudes into the real person.”  It’s about potential.  I gestured to my class – full of what would normally be called trouble-makers.  “This is my class.  Most of them have found the value of school, of acting appropriately, of gaining relationships where before there were none.  I don’t think they would have gotten that in a regular school.  When I was a boy,” I continued, “there were no schools like this.  Kids who didn’t fit in didn’t have a place to go.  Now they do.”  They would have been pulled up by the roots.  I thought to myself.  They would have been labeled as society’s weeds and never been given a chance to be appreciated for what they have to give.  The visitors smiled and thanked us all and quietly filed out.

I guess for me it is all about perspective.  It’s all in how you look at that dandelion.  Is it a flower with a golden head of sunshine, soon to turn into a gossamer moon-like blossom?  Or is it a pesky, invasive weed that kills grass?  Wouldn’t it be great if we had flowerbeds filled with dandelions and giant lacy-leafed plants?  Somewhere we could gently transplant unwanted weeds and allow them to grow unhindered by other flowers around them?  With gardeners who loved being amongst weeds.  Folks who just appreciated beauty in all its flavors, rather than the ones found just at the nursery.  I don’t know a place like that for flowers.  For now, dandelions are on their own.  The giant fern-like plant in my yard stays.  But here’s where the parable breaks down.  Weeds aren’t people and people aren’t weeds.  Sometimes weeds are just weeds and need to be pulled so other plants aren’t harmed and we shouldn’t make a parable about that.  But labels are important – in some instances they make us who we are – labels create and destroy.  Giving people another chance, another place to thrive is important.  I’m glad there are places where students like mine might, if given the right opportunities, thrive and blossom.  That is a good parable.

Today, even as I type these words, there is a place for the lost kids in my state.  They are busting into my classroom, looking over my shoulder, bugging me about what I write; trying to tell me about their lives.  But what they really need is someone to see beyond the labels they’ve been given.  They need new labels.  They aren’t weeds.  They are plants.  They were just in the wrong place.  Now they’re here, in a place where we care for them.  A team of us – a motley pirate crew of teachers who all believe the same thing.  All students, given time and solid relationships, can succeed.  With a bit of luck and a hell of a lot of patience, they just might bloom into something amazing.  Time to go to work.  Thanks Mr. Mortensen.