Hello, Beautiful
On Listening to Plants and Learning to Trust What Answers
Motherwort
I haven’t always been open about my relationship with plants.
If it came up, I’d usually laugh first.
“I talk to plants.”
Then I’d soften it with a joke about being a little woo-woo, as though humor could protect something that has quietly become one of the deepest relationships in my life.
I don’t really know when it changed.
Now, I can’t pass a tree or meet a new plant without greeting it.
Hello, Beautiful.
And more often than not, something greets me back.
Not in sentences.
Plants don’t often use words.
Sometimes I receive a name. Sometimes an image. Sometimes an unmistakable pull toward a particular action. I can’t explain the mechanics of it any more than I can explain why grief settles in the chest or why music can bring us to tears before we’ve understood the lyrics.
I’ve stopped needing to explain it.
I’ve learned to listen.
I’ve learned to hold, sit with and accept.
A few days ago, I was tidying the garden.
There was an old pile of black plastic and broken things waiting to be hauled away, and beneath the ordinary work of cleaning up was a plant I had noticed for several days. I’d been tossing weeds and debris into the pile for weeks, stepping around and over this particular plant. Nearly reverent but also half aware that something was available if I would stop a moment.
She had been whispering long before I slowed down enough to greet her.
Mid toss of a handful of thistle I looked down. It was time.
When I crouched beside her, I expected the familiar invitation—to touch a leaf, to notice her scent, to simply sit.
Instead, I felt something I have never experienced before.
Dig.
Not harvest.
Not admire.
Dig.
I have never felt compelled to dig up an unknown plant.
Or any plant.
Still, I imagined it, pulling her out of the soil.
Before I looked her up, I asked her name.
I already knew she belonged to the mint family. I could feel that much. But she didn’t carry mint’s reaching energy. Mint sprawls. It travels. It introduces itself to every available space.
This plant held her ground.
The word arrived before the thought.
Mother.
A breath later—
Motherwort.
I’m not particularly familiar with Motherwort.
But almost immediately, images began arriving the way they sometimes do.
Not information exactly.
Recognition.
I saw the arc of a woman’s body through time.
Menstruation.
Pregnancy.
Birth.
Loss.
Perimenopause.
Menopause.
The entire landscape of becoming.
Later, I would discover that Motherwort has long been used in herbal medicine to support women’s reproductive and cardiovascular systems.
That wasn’t the part that brought me to tears.
The part that undid me had nothing to do with organs.
She wasn’t speaking about anatomy.
She was speaking about the architecture of the Matriarch.
I found myself sitting in the dirt, gloves discarded beside me, holding her from root to tip.
Feeling, with startling clarity, that I was being seen.
Not praised.
Not comforted.
Seen.
She showed me the mother who holds everyone else’s center while quietly searching for her own.
The woman carrying the invisible weight of a household.
The one absorbing fear before it reaches her children.
The one learning unfamiliar landscapes while pretending they’re familiar enough for everyone else.
The one who keeps steering the ship even while she’s still learning the stars.
Later, I read more about Motherwort.
I smiled when I found stories of her accompanying women through upheaval, anxiety, grief, and the impossible work of holding families together.
Sometimes what arrives intuitively is echoed by tradition.
I no longer find that surprising.
What captivated me most was her form.
Her medicine isn’t hidden only in chemistry.
It’s written into the way she grows.
Square stems.
Firm posture.
Prickled calyxes that ask to be approached with respect.
She doesn’t creep.
She doesn’t apologize for the space she occupies.
She stands.
She protects.
She regulates the heart while refusing to abandon her own boundaries.
It struck me then that perhaps this, too, is maternal medicine.
Not endless softness.
Not self-erasure.
Protection.
The fierce kind.
The kind that knows love without boundaries eventually ceases to be love at all.
The kind that knows rage is sacred and the work held with it is necessary.
People sometimes ask me how I know plants speak.
I don’t.
Not in any way I could prove.
I only know that when I stopped insisting the world communicate in ways I already understood, the world became astonishingly conversational.
The plants have never seemed particularly interested in convincing me of anything.
They simply keep introducing themselves.
And, when I’m paying attention—
I remember to say,
Hello, Beautiful.
—Amber J. Jensen
This is really beautiful. Thank you. I would like to support woo-ing (how is it that we allow woo-woo to be an automatic argument against something we don't understand?). And talking with plants is completely natural, whether that is translated in to words, given as image, or felt as tone. This may be more our heritage as humans, and it may be where/how we need return to our roots going forward.
Beautifully written, I feel the resonance.