There’s a six-foot-tall bull thistle growing just outside my bedroom window. Regal in its posture, spiny in its presence. My mother hates it. She’s said so more than once, with the kind of conviction that makes you wonder if she’s talking about the thistle or something deeper.
I asked her recently what about it bothered her so much. It’s not hurting anything, not crowding out crops, not even blocking a path. In fact, it’s improving the soil—nature’s way of correcting a wound I hadn’t yet addressed. She paused for a moment, and we realized it wasn’t the plant itself. It was what it represented.
See, when she kept this land, wildness wasn’t welcome. She pulled every stray dandelion and refused to let the edges fray. Lawns were clipped, corners were tidy, and “clean” meant manicured. I walk a different road now. I welcome the mess—the rawness. We let the land breathe, and in doing so, we’ve invited everything from thistles to foxes. And yes, the fox takes a chicken now and then. I shrug. Wildness has its own terms.
That thistle, though—she’s a piece of work. Last night, while gathering up chickens, I discovered one hen nestled underneath her, safe from predators. I reached in to move a limb, got stung for the effort, and laughed through the pain. That unseemly, unwelcome plant was doing something useful: protecting a vulnerable life.
That’s the thing about weeds.
We’re taught to judge them at first glance—messy, aggressive, unwanted. But sometimes, the very thing we’re trying to get rid of is working quietly behind the scenes. Fixing the soil. Feeding the pollinators. Providing cover. Or reflecting something inside us we haven’t yet faced.
Still, weeds left unchecked have a way of winning.
It starts small—a patch of foxtail, a creeping vine. You see it, but you’re tired, so you move on. And then the next day, and the next, until it’s not a patch anymore—it’s the whole pasture. And that’s not just soil science. That’s life. Bitterness, overwhelm, burnout… they all start small. A stray thought. A missed boundary. A skipped rest day. Leave it long enough, and suddenly what you once managed starts managing you.
I’ve been in that season lately. Fighting off burnout one half-hearted breath at a time. Weeds in the pasture. Weeds in the freezer. Weeds in my spirit. I watch rabbit meat sit unsold while feed bills stack up. I count chickens after a fox visit. I wonder whether scaling back is wisdom or surrender. Some days I consider quitting. Some days I recommit. Most days I just hold on.
Burnout, I’m learning, is its own kind of weed.
It doesn’t always look messy. It might even look productive at first—taking on more, expanding the herd, growing the brand. But underneath it, there’s depletion. A creeping loss of joy. And if we don’t pull it early, we find ourselves too tired to pull at all.
So here’s what I’m telling myself:
Not every weed is bad. Some serve a purpose.
Not every purpose is painless. I’ve got the thistle sting to prove it.
And not every sting means something’s wrong.
But if we want to keep the pasture—and the spirit—from being overtaken, we have to be present. We have to decide what stays and what goes. And sometimes we just have to laugh, bandage the sting, and thank the thistle for doing her job.
Because wild things grow where the land is alive.
And sometimes, so do we.
