I didn’t plant the violets. I never had to — they’ve always grown here, scattered generously across my half-acre in Minnesota. But I only started noticing them differently long after my brain injury — after I had already become a vegetable gardener, after I’d learned to grow my own food and even started foraging. The real turning point came when I discovered how much more wild foods had to offer me. I was reading about plant compounds that support immunity and skin healing, and there they were: violets. Already present. Already offering.
It wasn’t the first time this happened. Over and over, plants I hadn’t planted began appearing right when I needed them. The more I noticed, the more I wondered: is this coincidence… or communication?
Healing Isn’t Always Linear (Or Visible)
More than a decade ago, I sustained a moderate traumatic brain injury during a horse-jumping lesson. There was internal bleeding in the brain, and I spent time in the hospital. I don’t remember everything, but I do remember needing a walker for a while because my balance was off. I remember not being able to tell which keys on my own keychain unlocked what. I was advised — unofficially — not to see clients for thirty days. My speech was too slow, but no one told me directly. That was the beginning of the long, invisible part of recovery.
What’s lingered isn’t just memory lapses or fatigue. It’s a deepened sensitivity — to food, to chemicals, to people’s energy. Anxiety and obsessive thoughts (Pure O) crept in where clarity used to live. Years later, after a stage 2 melanoma diagnosis in 2012, I doubled down on healing. I started eating more vegetables than I ever imagined possible, started foraging, growing, and blending every bit of nourishment I could coax from the earth. That was the turning point. And that’s when I began noticing what had been quietly growing around me all along.
The Plants Were Already Offering
At first, I thought I was doing all the work — researching, testing foods, logging symptoms, eliminating triggers. But something shifted when I stopped looking only at what I was putting on my plate and started paying attention to what was growing just outside my door.
The violets had always been there, but now I saw them. Chickweed appeared in soft green carpets. Dandelion pushed up through the pathways. Virginia waterleaf caught my attention with its speckled leaves, just as I was learning how deeply nourishing it could be.
They weren’t just plants anymore. They were patterns. They showed up right when I needed what they offered — cooling, cleansing, nourishing, supporting. They weren’t the foods I thought I needed. They were the ones I actually needed.
What Science Now Confirms
For a long time, I thought this was just personal — maybe even poetic. That the plants growing around me seemed to match my healing needs. But then I started reading the science, and the pieces fell into place.
Healthy soil isn’t just dirt. It’s alive — teeming with bacteria, fungi, and microbial communities that shape the health of the plants growing in it. When those plants are picked and eaten soon after harvest — especially raw or lightly rinsed — they carry that microbial life into our gut. And what’s in the gut, we now know, speaks directly to the brain.
Research has shown that exposure to certain soil microbes (like Mycobacterium vaccae) can reduce anxiety-like behaviors and even increase serotonin production. Other studies link the richness of the soil microbiome to the richness of the gut microbiome — and in turn, to better mood regulation, immune function, and nervous system resilience.
What I’d stumbled into intuitively — eating what grew near me, simplifying my diet, trusting the weeds — is something science is only just beginning to understand: that the land and our bodies are in conversation. That healing might not come from far away, but from just beneath our feet.
Relational Eating and Green Messengers
These days, I don’t think of food as just fuel, or weeds as things to fight back. I think of them as signals. As responses. The violets, the chickweed, the dandelion — they were already growing while I was still trying to figure out what was wrong with me. They weren’t waiting for a diagnosis. They were already offering support.
My diet isn’t restrictive anymore — it’s relational. I eat what calms my nervous system, not what excites my cravings. I notice what helps me sleep, what keeps my thoughts from spinning, what makes me feel steady in my skin. And often, those things grow just outside the door.
I don’t romanticize the hard parts. The brain injury, the melanoma, the anxiety that still flickers at times — they’ve been real and sometimes brutal teachers. But in their aftermath, I’ve become someone who listens more closely. Not just to symptoms, but to signals. And the land — full of green messengers — has been one of the clearest.
What’s Growing Around You?
It’s been nearly 17 years since the brain injury and over a decade since the melanoma diagnosis — long enough to forget some of the hardest parts, but not the way they reshaped me. I didn’t expect healing to come through food. I certainly didn’t expect it to come through the weeds. But looking back, I can see a quiet intelligence in what showed up uninvited. The more I paid attention, the more it felt like the land was listening, too.
Maybe healing doesn’t always start with effort. Maybe it starts with noticing what’s already growing — and asking why it’s here.