The Work Nobody Sees: guidance from the land

Every body has their own way of talking to the mystery.

To spirit. To what lives on the other side of what we can see.

For me, it’s always been the land. The plants. The animals. The ones who don’t need words to say what they mean.

I’ve been living on this acre for fourteen years now. And what I want to do is try to put into words what it has taught me. Knowing, as I say that, some of it won’t survive the translation.

When we bought this place, people thought we were losing our minds.

It looked like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The house needed everything. And the land — this land — was full of garbage. Not metaphorically. Literally. The previous owners had buried garbage in the ground. We rented those giant industrial bins, the ones a truck drops in your driveway and hauls away. We filled them twice. Children’s bicycles. Car parts. Pieces of railroad track. Old bottles. Old toys. This house was built in the sixties. It carried decades of other people’s carelessness in its skin.

Two summers to excavate what they left behind.

The third summer, we planted wildflowers.

Where garbage once lived, we put seeds.

We focused on native species…things that belonged here, in this specific region, in this specific soil. And over the years when I’d find something on a hiking trail that stopped me, I’d look it up, come back for its seeds, and bring them home. The idea was to build a living ecosystem. To make this small piece of land a sanctuary… for the birds, for the animals, for whatever wanted to come.

As I write this, the male cardinal is outside my window, singing.

But I didn’t know enough, back then, about invasive species.

There was something growing on this property that I assumed was part of the wildflowers. Part of what belonged. I didn’t question it.

Goutweed.

If you know, you know.

By the time I understood what I was dealing with, it had choked out an entire four-thousand square foot section. Everything I’d cultivated. Everything I’d seeded with intention. Gone under. Swallowed. A monoculture where a garden used to be.

There is no shortcut with this plant. You dig. By hand. You remove every piece of root, because even a fragment left behind becomes a new invasion. You do this section by section, year after year. You add seeds back and you wait.

And this process. This particular, unglamorous, repetitive process…has been one of my greatest teachers.

Because when I finish digging out a section the size of my bedroom, I feel like I’ve done something enormous. And then I look at what remains, and it looks like nothing. It looks like I’ve done nothing at all. From the outside — nothing. From the inside, this strange reckoning with patience and faith and the long view.

The mind plays tricks here. It wants the reward to be visible. It wants the scale to match the effort.

And it almost never does.

What this work has asked of me is a particular kind of dedication. A particular kind of love that doesn’t require an audience. A relationship with a vision that may not fully arrive in my lifetime of living here.

Because here’s the part I have to sit with: when I sell this home one day, the next owners may not keep up what I’ve been doing. The goutweed may take back everything. And I have to be willing to let that go. I have to do the work anyway.

There are moments I ask myself… is this even worth it?

All these hours. All these seasons. Spring, summer, fall, on my knees in the dirt.

And then I remember: this is how I give back to the land. This is my living prayer. This is the thing my body knows, even when my mind questions it.

I was raised with this teaching: you always leave a place better than you found it.

My grandparents lived off the land. They taught me how to work it. I am the first generation in my family to be raised buying food from a grocery store… the first to be born into the new world entirely. But I had the gift of time at their house, working their gardens. Time in both worlds. The old way and the new one, overlapping in my hands.

I carry that forward here, on this acre.

Even if no one sees it.

Even if the goutweed comes back.

This is what I have to give.

• Natalie 🌿

If this felt like a conversation you wanted to stay in...

There are conversations happening in Mystic Marrow (in Patreon) that won't make it here. Not because they're secret, well maybe a little — because they need a sacred container. If what you read today stirred something in you, that's where we keep going.

Mystic Marrow