I have no poker face. Everyone in my family would tell you this. I am earnest even when it would help to have a little more guile.  

Here is an example from when I was a teenager living in Mexico. My family was staying in the gorgeous town of Oaxaca. We were sitting in the town square drinking café con leche when a rug seller came by with a rug I fell in love with. BTW I still have this rug in my bedroom so it wasn’t a tempestuous quick love but a long term one.

My father loved to bargain. He really was most himself in Mexico and loved everything about the culture including the give and take in the market.  Me, not so much. I felt like the poor rug dealer had worked so hard , and I had the babysitting money and well, it was okay to pay whatever the man asked for the rug.  However my father liked the game and he was going to play it.

Scenting a sale, the rug dealer circled. After all, how could he miss the signs of me telegraphing my desire for the rug so obviously, so earnestly. My father gave me a glare and went back to his coffee. Oh, how preoccupied he was with his coffee. Oh how he was enjoying the ambience of the plaza. He hadn’t a care in the world. And me? No doubt I was wringing my hands and completely giving my father’s game away.  And so the game concluded way too fast for both my father and the rug dealer, but I had my rug. I am sure in my father’s mind and in the mind of the rug dealer I overpaid for my rug, but what do you do with an overly earnest little thing like me?

Anyways, all this to say, when a number of you suggested I try and find something nice to say about Bindweed, I took it to heart. No way could I lie to you and pretend I had found peace and happiness with the Bindweed without TRYING TO DO SO. You wouldn’t have believed a glowing report about Bindweed after the last rant, especially from me, UNLESS IT WAS TRUE.  I needed to soul search and see if I could come up with ANYTHING nice to say from a genuine place.

But more importantly, yours was a valid and important request for me to look for the Divinity in Bindweed.  Divinity is a seamless unity of everything INCLUDING BINDWEED so Divinity had to be in there somewhere. As the saying goes, “If you can’t see the Divinity everywhere then you can’t see the Divinity anywhere.”

Thus began a couple weeks in which I have searched for something positive about Bindweed. I mostly thought about this as I pulled up Bindweed which didn’t help my search. Yes, it was getting me to slow down but in a tedious sort of way. Yes it was making me appreciate the places in the garden where there is no Bindweed, but I wasn’t getting to spend any time in them. Yes, it was getting me to consider radical reorganization of the gardens to deal with the Bindweed problem, and maybe that’s good, but it’s a BIG job to reorganize 35 year old gardens.

Then the Bindweed took a backseat to the deer.

Oh the deer.

They have been extremely voracious this summer. Nowhere have they done more damage than to the Day Lilies. Every time a Day Lily group is about to explode in a bounty of blossoms, the deer sweep in at night and take out all the blossoms. My expectation of glory followed by a complete loss of all blossoms is an emotional roller coaster I want to get off.

Me = The too earnest gardener

Deer = The game winners because deer got game.

And my pathetic effort to get game by tying up twine around and through all the gardens? This labyrinth of string was an abject failure. The deer just leap up and over the string like it is part of the fun. Let’s face it, to them it IS part of the fun.

My first realization vis a vis the Deer was that I needed to accept who I AM and take myself out of the game. I will need to either fence in another garden this fall and move all the Day Lilies into this space or put the Day Lilies in the already fenced in lower vegetable garden. There are a lot of Day Lilies. Several hundred plants. They would probably like a chance to bloom.

But even solving that problem I was left with both the deer AND Bindweed calling me to find a genuine silver lining. I will say that I deepened my appreciation for all Flowers not wrapped by Bindweed or eaten by deer. Furthermore, I am grateful deer do not like to eat Red Shiso or Calendulas or Zinnias but DO like to eat Bindweed.

Not ringing praise.

So, being the earnest person I am and ready to put aside my prejudice to seek an elusive AH HA moment about Bindweed, I decided a few days ago to make a Bindweed Flower Essence again. I had done this many years ago when we were better friends, but the inventory is gone.  Making the Essence again of this small white Morning Glory shaped Flower was sort of a moment of defeat.

However………as I went to store the Bindweed Mama Essence after its day in the sun, I felt an energy of such purity coming from the Flower Essence that I was stopped in my tracks. WOW!  If a Flower can take its basic bullying nature then bring forward a Flower and Flower Essence of such pure light, then we can all leave behind whatever good, bad and ugly things that went before and find a pure light within ourselves.

Oddly enough, this freed me up to laugh about the deer situation too. They just pushed me to lighten up and see the game as just a game. What a ridiculous moment in the game that today I am in the gardens searching for a Bindweed Flower to photograph for here.  How silly that I dwell on the eaten Day Lily buds and miss the abundance of Flowers everywhere else! In causing problems these two rogue elements broke me open to see the bounty in front of me.

So yes, I finally found something positive I can genuinely, earnestly say about Bindweed AND the deer. With Bindweed in particular, it embodies the truth that even in the darkest of situations or darkest of personalities, the light lives and can AND WILL prevail and rise up as the ultimate expression of all that went before. If Bindweed can give the world such a pure Flower then most certainly we can AND WILL transmute any situation or anything we have ever done or been to be pure light. And laugh and be grateful at the same time!

Not a bad place to land with Bindweed and the deer so I thank you for your nudges to reconsider my position! I’ll put the Bindweed on the additional Essence list for now- but don’t be surprised if after all this, it goes onto the main line up this fall. Won’t that be funny.

Lucky thing an earnest person like myself doesn’t mind eating crow.