What if the block is the medicine?
On weeds, wonder, and lion's teeth.
Hi little coven. Before you get into today’s essay, take a minute to pour yourself a cup of your favorite herbal teal (it’s thematically relevant) and register for my free event this weekend, a Q+A with author Meg Jones Wall.
We’ll be talking about Meg’s book, Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey for Radical Transformation, and about our shared interest in the creative power of the tarot. Sign up here.
How old were you when you learned that dandelions were weeds?
I think I must have been around seven or eight — I can’t remember if it was a prelude or a follow-up to the truth about Santa Claus, but I can tell you that the revelation felt equally destabilizing.
I can’t remember, either, who broke the news. But I remember the confusion. As far as I’d been concerned, there was only one criterion for calling something a weed, and that was ugliness. Pretty = flower, ugly = weed. A simple binary I’d learned from watching Disney films and existing in a world that generally seemed to agree with the pretty=good/ugly=bad dichotomy.
I remember my reclassification of dandelion from flower to weed as an early discovery of the oppressive hierarchies of taste. It was the first time that something I had deemed pretty and full of potential was revealed to be, in someone else’s mind, something ugly, and worse: unworthy of taking up space.
Before, I’d been equally happy to make flower crowns from dandelions as I was from daisies. Pretty=good. But what flower child wants a crown of weeds, once she knows the ugly truth?
After, whenever I saw a dandelion, it wouldn’t be a sunny yellow bloom or dreamy orb that caught my attention, but the aggressive, off-green stalk… the ugly part I hadn’t known to look for before. I looked for ugliness everywhere, so that I could avoid it.
At that age, I didn’t understand the politics of a garden. I couldn’t conceptualize that these small joys along the sidewalk, all these wishes, all that treasure, could be a pest, could choke out the life of other beautiful things.
I didn’t understand that beauty could hide violence. Or that it was completely within my power to define what was pretty and what was ugly to me.
I lost a love for dandelions because someone told me they were weeds.
What might have happened if someone had told me the other half of the truth: that these resilient plants hold magic in their DNA?
In a recent Creative Mornings Field Trip event on The Poetry of Plant Magic, hosted by Leya Van Doren, I met dandelions anew: not as ugly blights on white-picket-fence gardens, not as symbols of my bad taste, but as healers.
Dandelions are good for the earth: nutrients in their roots can rejuvenate the soil, and bees love them. Even the tough stems and sharp leaves offer something beautiful: a wildlife corridor in miniature, providing shelter and safety for small mammals and insects on the move.
Dandelions are good for our bodies, too. Rich in vitamins A, K, and E, as well as iron and potassium, dandelions have a more nutritious profile than broccoli. You can toss the blossoms into a salad to take advantage of their healthy properties, or use them to aid digestion by steeping the roots and bitter leaves for tea, or even boiling them into soup.
Exploring plant magic didn’t just heal a multi-decade rift between dandelions and me; it restored me creatively, too. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been agonizing over the next essay I wanted to write here on The Shuffle. I have at least ten pieces languishing, halfway done, in the drafts, but nothing felt right for this week. I felt blocked, and a little scared. On Monday, I gave up: “I am committing to not publishing an essay this week,” I told my writing group. “I feel the pressure, but I don’t feel the spark. So I’m going to cancel my self-imposed deadline and let this week go. I’m going to give myself the gift of taking time to think, instead of forcing myself to do.”
On Tuesday, I joined Leya’s workshop. As if I’d wished for it by blowing on a seeding dandelion, inspiration arrived, a seed on the wind. Invasive species that it is, the dandelion quickly and effectively colonized my imagination.
After summing up the dandelion’s history and benefits, Leya offered a journaling prompt: “What did you think was a weed, but was actually a treasure?”
The first half of the prompt was easy: the experience of the past couple of weeks came to mind. The block I’d been experiencing felt like a weed. A menace in the garden of my creative productivity. Block often feels like a dandelion doing its worst: invasive and overpowering.
As for the second part, I wondered: like the dandelion itself, could I recontextualize block into treasure? Could I find ways to focus on how block might promote healing and wonder?
Before we go any further, you should know that I am not in the “creative block doesn’t exist” camp. I firmly believe, as a creative person and as a coach to others, that every creative experience — positive or negative — is valid. If you say you’re blocked, I believe you. If you feel it, it’s real to you, and your experience deserves respect. I’m not here to argue that block is merely an excuse to avoid creative work. Instead, I want to propose that block is real, but that it needn’t be dangerous.
I understand that for some, there can be comfort and relief in refusing to believe block is a thing. But for me, the comfort usually comes from acknowledging blocks, rather than denying my experience. The relief comes when I accept it, when I apply myself to learning what to do with it — when I get curious about what block offers me, instead of trying to eradicate it. The more real I believe it is, the more I have to work with it and through it, instead of against it.
A Sufi proverb about dandelions comes to a similar, even warmer, conclusion: in the version Leya summarized for us in her Plant Magic workshop, a man plants a garden. He works hard to till the soil and nurture his chosen seeds into bloom. But the garden is overrun by dandelions. Every other gardener he turns to for advice has the same problem: these weeds are ruining everything, and no one knows what to do about it. Finally, he seeks out a mystic. “What should I do about these dandelions?” he asks. The mystic’s response: “Learn to love them.”
In other words: they aren’t going anywhere. The weeds are here to stay, so why not change the way you relate to them? Why focus on what they’re ruining when you can’t change that? Why not discover what benefits they have to offer? I think we can say the same about creative block.
So, a question: what is there to love about creative block? Can we redefine the weed as treasure?
It occurs to me that I already did, when I said: “I’m going to give myself the gift of taking time to think, instead of forcing myself to do.” When block arrived, I chose to listen to it. I chose to let it overrun the order of my well-cultivated garden of drafts and ideas. I chose to say “OK, you’re here. I’ll make room. I’ll readjust. I’ll find the beauty in sitting with you, and letting you do your thing.” In acknowledging the block’s inevitable presence, I was free to show up to the Plant Magic workshop with zero expectations or agenda. My mind was open to ideas, because, after all, what else was it doing? Admitting defeat made space for dandelions, which it turned out, was exactly the treasure I needed.
I shared my response to the prompt in the workshop chat: “I’m thinking about how creative block feels like a weed, but can be a treasure. It forces retreat, reconsideration, restoration.”
A day later, that stray thought became this essay.
Another journal prompt from the workshop, this time inspired by the dandelion’s detoxifying properties: “What do you need to flush out?”
The answer: my own mind. I needed to empty all the pressure I was putting on myself to deliver, and return to my creative life with curiosity and play. I needed to show up to a workshop and spend an hour lost in flowers.
The block, I realized, was my medicine.
Just like the dandelion offers a hearty vitamin profile, block can be a nutrient, too: it forces us to think, forces us to be. It closes doors so that we can admire the view out the window. It creates wildlife corridors for ideas that get lost in the real weeds: the ego, the inner critic, creative envy.
One more thing about dandelions: I was surprised to learn that the name dandelion comes from the French dents-de-lion, meaning lion’s teeth. It’s not a reference to the mane of golden petals that so coincidentally resembles the king of the jungle, but to the sharp edges of the leaves that grow from the base of the plant.
Thinking about lion’s teeth — and about resilience, and about the counter-intuitive healing properties of embracing something seen as a violent menace to beauty, drew my mind to a certain tarot card. Strength depicts a maiden, adorned with flowers, holding a lion by the face, her delicate fingers centimeters away from the beast’s incisors.
In The New Tarot Handbook, Rachel Pollack assigns two key phrases to Strength that feel particularly relevant to our discussion about block as medicine here: Pollack identifies Strength as a card about “transforming negativity” (or, turning a weed into a treasure) and “emotional openness” (the quality that allows us to do that transformative work).
In a few versions of the tarot, Strength is depicted as a more physically literal image: the maiden replaced by a muscular hero who tames the lion through brute force. I’m grateful that most decks are faithful to the gentler, more nuanced version. One that celebrates reconciliation and harmony. In the Rider Waite Smith version of the card, it appears that the maiden is about to peer into the lion’s mouth, as if the creature might have a toothache, or have swallowed something it shouldn’t have. It’s the way my partner holds our dog when brushing his little teeth. This is tending. Not a show of physical domination, but an intimate moment of care. Like the Sufi gardener who learned to love the dandelions, the Strength maiden has accepted the lion into her life, and offers it love. She masters it through care and attention, not through violence.
So the challenge: Can we offer our experiences of block the same tenderness? Can we treasure them, instead of trying to eradicate them? Can we end the fixation on what block ruins, and instead recognize what it protects, what it nourishes, what toxins it flushes out?
I like to think that, just like there was a time before dandelions were weeds in my mind, there was a time before block was a threat. That Eden is gone, but a new garden is possible, one where wild dandelions and wilder blocks have room to bloom into beautiful things, one where I let them be what they are, and consider what crowns they’ll help me weave. •
Join the conversation in the comments:
What did this piece bring up for you? I’d love to know:
How old were you when you learned dandelions were weeds?
What medicinal properties could leaning in to experiences of block offer you?
What elements of your creative practice do you need to learn to love?
Anything else you’d like to share
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Thanks for reading x
This was such an interesting way to put a spin on creative block that I have never really thought of. Thank you!
Loved this and couldn't agree more, and what a beautiful way to lead us through this idea. Thank you!