Unfurling
It’s the time of year that the ocotillo should be blooming, like fiery, lanky torches erupting from the desert. In the stark landscape, they beckon with their flamboyant burst of color, and if you keep a sharp eye out, you can see tiny hummingbirds dipping in and out of the trumpet-shaped flowers. One could be forgiven for getting lost in the aerial displays and missing the plants’ formidable thorns hiding under the stumpy leaves. Like most things in Texas, their spindly awkwardness and vibrant cheer are deceptive. So, too, the light touch of the hummingbird, disguising the deftness and skill of his maneuvers behind what looks like gentle effortlessness. To enjoy the ocotillo’s sweeter side takes a healthy respect for its edges along with a delicate touch.
I’ve been meaning for a long time to take my partner to West Texas to see the ocotillos in bloom. I grew up far away in Houston, amidst the salty clay soil and the sprawling live oak trees, where the air is redolent of salt and refinery and concrete and petrichor. I didn’t find the desert until adulthood, by chance, on a trip through the state with an ex. The moment I stepped into the Chisos Mountains it felt like a distant home, something I felt inside like an ancestral call. I lived here once, I don’t know when. The power running in the ground and rippling through the sky was familiar. I could feel it. Touch it. Smell it. The animals stopped and looked at me with a startled curiosity when we crossed paths, as if they sensed it, too. The javelinas, coyotes, deer, roadrunners, snakes. I felt like I belonged here, in a way that you will understand if you’ve ever experienced the same, and that words will never adequately convey if you haven’t. When I went back so many years later with my mother, I could feel it still. And again, later still, with my father and his wife, before she died. The land recognized me, and I, it. I do not know how, because there is no known ancestry that links me to this place. But there was no mistaking it. The land holds the secrets and memories we keep from each other, holding them until they can be rediscovered.
I think now it is too late for the trip I wanted to make with her, and I don’t know that another chance will come. You have to show your driver’s license to the border guards as you leave town to go back up north, even if you never left Texas. But there are too many questions now, and too little oversight. Everything needs to be just so. The right papers. The right name. The right accent. The right clothes. The right gender. The right tattoo. Otherwise you just…disappear. They disappear you now. It isn’t safe for so many of us to go here anymore. Even when we were born here. Even when the land itself — so much more mighty than human laws are — calls to us. I do not know that I can go back to Texas now. I don’t know when I can. Maybe I will never see these things again. The ocotillo in the Chisos Mountains. My father, in assisted care in Houston. The cedar and limestone in the hills of Austin.
I think now it is too late for the trip I wanted to make with her.
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The tight, maroon maple buds are appearing in Maryland alongside the yellow forsythia and pink cherry blossoms. I’ve been trying to take walks in the evening on days when I get home before the sun’s gone down so that I can follow the progress of spring. First the veronica flowers, henbit deadnettle, and dandelions. Then the mugwort appears alongside the elm and magnolia blossoms. The mugwort is one of my favorites for foraging, although I’ve been contemplating sneaking into the neighbor’s yard to pinch a dozen magnolia blossoms and experiment with magnolia wine. I don’t know if I’ll have time here to rest it long enough to enjoy it at its fullest, but there are things to be said for young wines, too. One of the best I ever made was with yarrow, dandelion, and clover. I was too impatient to see how it turned out to let it mature for more than a month or two. (It was perfect.) This week, the maple and cherry have started to appear.
As part of my journey to be more in touch with the rhythms and medicines of the natural world and less caught up in the maddeningly unnecessary cataclysms of the human one, I’ve been reading about the dozens of variety of horta that grow in Greece and that the locals forage every year with zeal. Some, like chicory and dandelion (radiki), dock (lapatho), purslane (glistrida), and amaranth (vlita), can be found here. Others, like black bryony (avronies), brighteyes (pikralida), and Mediterranean hartwort (kafkalida) are ones I’m unfamiliar with. They haven’t hitchhiked to the US yet, not like the others. Among this small selection of the many wild Greek greens, only amaranth is likely native to both places. A symbol of immortality, it was considered sacred to Artemis, Demeter, Xochiquetzal, and Xochipilli, among other deities.
Wanting to return to natural rhythms and live more humbly and in healthy relationships with the earth and with other people is one thing, of course. Doing all of them is something different. For whatever reasons, we do not like to make it easy for ourselves as a species.
When I transitioned, I kept the name my parents gave me as a way to honor my mother and her parents. They were confused and a little put out when my parents chose to name me Alexis. That’s a boy’s name, Peenie-mou, I imagine my yia yia saying to her, bemused at what must have seemed like a bizarre, hippie choice. Alexis is a boy’s name. My mother was always a free spirit. This would have just been another way she snubbed tradition.
When I was still a little girl, my grandparents wanted me and my brother to learn Greek and be baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church, because these are the two things that Greeks consider to be the heart of Greekness. Although my grandmother was born in the US, her own parents immigrated here from Sparta. My grandfather, meanwhile, became an American after spying and translating for US forces during World War II. Back then, we still granted citizenship to foreigners who aided us during our war efforts. It’s not like today, where we leave them out to dry after the conflict ends.
These two things — language and the Church — are so central to Greek identity that Greece has a special path to citizenship for people who had Greek parents or grandparents. It sounds like the sort of thing that’s in the bag for those who are used to ideas of blood citizenship. According to the Constitution, you have a right to citizenship in this situation, you need only claim it. But when you get into the details of the naturalization process even for those who take this route, you discover that what this right grants you is a much faster (only 2 years!) path to citizenship. But you still have to pass a fitness test that includes the ability to speak Greek and that assesses your moral worthiness as a final step in the process. The underlying assumption is that if you have a Greek parent or grandparent, regardless of whether you yourself were raised in the country, you will have learned the language and you will have been baptized into the Orthodox Church. In a country where 98% of the citizens are baptized into the Church whether or not they consider themselves faithful and secular, it’s almost impossible to conceptualize that someone born of Greek ancestors outside the country would not have these two central parts of their Greekness passed on to them as a natural part of their ancestral inheritance.
This is what my mother’s parents wanted for us. But my father — who’s family is Scotch-Irish — said no. His family was in the US for longer than my mother’s Greek side. At least some of his ancestors came to the US in the Presbyterian flight from Ulster that took place in the 18th century, and Irish memory and grudges are famously long-lived. My father wasn’t any kind of religious anymore, but he was going to be damned if he let his children be baptized Catholic.
One summer, my yia yia tried to exploit a loophole in Orthodox doctrine that says a layperson can perform an emergency baptism on someone they believe will die outside of the Church. She pulled my brother and I into the bedroom, furtively sprinkling our foreheads with holy water while she said prayers in Greek we couldn’t understand. I do not know if she was ever able to convince a priest to finalize the process by accepting her surreptitious bedroom anointing. And I don’t know if they’d do it now even if I asked. The Greek state might have decided that it’s acceptable to be trans, but they fought the Church kicking and screaming the entire way. The resentment is still fresh on both sides, ready to be pulled back open any moment.
Even so, I will travel there again this summer when I go to Europe to try and find a new place to live. The environment in the land I was born is no longer safe. So few of the people here have ever learned how to tend to it.
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The dogwood blossoms unfurled overnight, between the day I sat down to start writing this piece and the next when I sat down to try and finish it. The writing is taking too long. AI writing is always terrible, because it doesn’t use writing to think. It has no thought in it. It just uses writing to proclaim. It puts facts together into what it thinks is an algorithmically logical order so that it can declare them. But there’s no thought that really connects them, which is what good writing does. It helps you think.
The writing is taking too long because I’m trying to fumble my way to hope and it isn’t there yet. If I could just find the right words or the right sign, hear the right thing or catch a whiff of it on a breeze. Then take these things and weave them all together into something hopeful. I know that the thing will be there. I just need to keep looking, listening. To go into the world even on the days when I do not want to. Opportunity presents itself constantly, even if the window of time can be short. You miss the delicate fronds of the fiddleheads if you wait more than a week or two. Blink and they’re gone. But when they go, there will inevitably be something else to take their place.
I might have missed the chance to collect the magnolia, they’re already beginning to brown at the edges. I stood at a neighbor’s fence on my evening walk, too prudish to nip across and collect a dozen blooms before slipping away into the dusk. But they aren’t mine, I kept thinking as I stood in front of the sprawling tree so laden with excess bloom that I followed its scent for three blocks before I found it hiding in a back alley. I can only laugh at myself. Too prissy to take twelve blossoms, while trillions of dollars are being siphoned out of working Americans’ pockets as I write this. While their healthcare, homes, farms, retirement are being plundered. While people are being stolen off the street in broad daylight, trafficked to labor camps in other countries. But I’m an enemy of the state in light of the high crime of being trans? I couldn’t even take twelve blossoms from my neighbor who would never miss them, because they weren’t mine to take.
When Hannah Arendt wrote about totalitarianism, one thing she was at pains to try and describe was how they reversed the law. Reversed morality. They made it illegal to protect your fellow man. Illegal to speak truth. Illegal to feed those who needed to be fed and house those who needed to be housed. To steal. To lie. To kill. To betray. Those were made legal, instead. I remember in the classes where we talked about this, the other students always found her a bit histrionic. They were convinced that she was somehow always exaggerating things, even when they more or less respected what she had to say. It didn’t make sense. How do you just reverse the law? And people just…accept that? I would never do that, the students said, failing to realize that it is both more and less simple than that. Simple, because true morality really is that simple. When you strip away all the jargon and fancy words, Kant’s moral imperative is actually just the golden rule. He had to make it complicated so an Enlightenment society obsessed with “reason” might be able to puzzle their way to it, unable, as they were, to recognize a truth available to even a five-year-old because of their own intellectual pretentions. Everything far more complicated than it needs to be.
But when was the last time you met a person who truly lived artlessly? Someone who says I would never and you know that they don’t just think it, they don’t just wish it, but they actually live it?
Justifying our wrong actions with reasons is both the highest and lowest art of all. Everyone is a master of it.
My world feels like it’s shrinking, so I forced myself out today, to listen to some talks about European folk beliefs and witchcraft. Lectures on fairies in Wales, Alpine witchery, and creating communities across difference. I went because I needed to get out, and I knew my partner would like to hear about the fairies. She once had an experience in Scotland like my experience in West Texas. When she tells the story, she was flying into Edinburgh and was overcome with it before the plane even touched the ground. I burst into tears as if the very cells of my body recognized it she likes to say with her characteristic flourish, which, as someone who’s experienced this myself, isn’t actually a flourish at all. It was only after I got there I found out my grandmother, who I was named after, was from a clan who’d been in Edinburgh for a thousand years. When she went to Wales later for her PhD, she reached out to the land to see if the experience with it there would be the same. She says it saw her as a stranger, but told her that it owed her a debt.
At the end of the lecture, once the rest of the audience had left, I asked the speaker how it was to be trans in Wales. I hated to ask. She’d been an electric speaker. When you teach, you learn to spot the people who know how to command an audience, developing a persona for the stage and putting energy into the crowd. When you do it well, you get most of that energy back. But you never get quite the full amount in return. It’s tiring. When I told her I was hoping to move to Europe with my partner, her face softened, the performer fell away for a moment. Oh yes, she said. We have our own government. If England has chased hard after the US in its race to the bottom, tacking to the hard right in recent years, the rest of the UK has moved further to the left. Not merely out of a desire to distinguish themselves from England (tho’ one imagines that famed Irish pettiness and memory is matched only by that of the Welsh). But also because the quickest way to learn the simple truth of human decency is to be denied it. Being on the wrong end of a boot makes one disinclined to wear them, she said simply. The answer flowed with an effortless generosity. It cost her nothing, and I felt silly for having been so hesitant. And it was the little bit of hope I had been looking for.
By the time I was to the end of the talk on Alpine witches, my mind was racing with serious ideas for historical projects. This hasn’t happened since I finished my dissertation. The speaker was relying on historical legal proceedings that detailed spells used by people accused of witchcraft to identify and reinvigorate historical practices that had been lost to centuries of witch trials and persecution. I’ve been noodling idly for some time about a historical project that takes these lay efforts to preserve and pass on knowledge seriously in their own right. Too often they’re discounted as lacking rigor. Personally, I can’t help but suspect that they’re discounted for no other reason than that they’re unruly, taking place outside of the watchful gaze of “proper” authorities. But I want to know how knowledge is preserved when those same authorities don’t want it preserved. They are valuable precisely because they elude that rule.
When I came home, I looked up gorse, a plant that had been mentioned as being a traditional protection against fairies. The picture she showed was of a thick spray of yellow flowers clustered on fat stems. I’ve never come across it before. It’s native to Western Europe and has only made it to the West Coast of the United States so far. Like other members of the broom family, it spreads its seeds when it catches fire, spraying them into the scorched earth so that it rises from the ashes like a phoenix. To maximize its chances of setting root quickly under such harsh conditions, it thrives in the kinds of rocky, dry, depleted soils where others cannot gain a foothold. Like the ocotillo, it guards against encroachment with thorns. But it’s shrubbier than its spindly Texas cousin. Birds, deft as they are, are drawn to its prickliness. The thorns provide excellent protection for their nests.
I think now it is too late for the trip I wanted to make with her. I do not think I will see the ocotillos again. But new things are opening all the time.
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