I’ve been looking from an upstairs window of the Manse for many weeks now, keeping on eye on the allotment the other side of the garden hedge. Split into 3 plots, ours (ours being me and by wonderful husband, Malcolm) is the bottom plot. At first all was good when I looked out. An allotment of brown earth. Then glimpses of green began to emerge. It was ok to start with, they were just glimpses after all. Then the view of the allotment definitely changed from being brown earth to a big patch of various greens of life forms! Now when I look out there’s a forest of dock leaves and dandelions! It’s a disaster! Dock leaves and dandelions don’t belong in an allotment. Or do they?
Dock leaves I know help relieve stinging nettle stings. They might be useful then because I’m confident that stinging nettles will emerge too at some point. What about dandelions?
As I think, I remember the pop man. We used to have a pop man who basically was the same as the milkman but delivered pop instead of milk. (I say man because they were men). We had 4 bottles of pop delivered every Friday and me and my siblings were allowed to choose the flavours. We always chose dandelion and burdock because it tastes good but also if you pour it from a great height, for a moment, you get a frothy head on the top of this dark coloured pop. We felt very grown up as we pretended to be drinking beer!
Anyway, I remember that you can drink pop with dandelions in! So, is having dandelions (we’ll deal with dock leaves another time), in the allotment a bad thing? Doing a bit of Googling, dandelions may have many potential health benefits. They contain potent antioxidants, and may: help fight inflammation, aid blood sugar control, reduce cholesterol, lower blood pressure, promote a healthy liver, aid weight loss, fight cancer. There’s more research by professionals to be done but there are a lot of possibilities that could be gained from dandelions! It’s possible to eat the roots, leaves and flowers.
So maybe dandelions do belong in the allotment. Who told me they were a weed and not welcome? I don’t know. It’s just there in my mind, my belief, my default position. It is possible to view people in the same way. It’s just there, in our minds, our belief, our default position leading us to treat people differently. Some we give more respect to than others. It’s possible to have different degrees as to how we treat people.
In modern speak it’s called equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) and something that most organisations, including churches, encourage people to engage in, to examine our minds and beliefs, realise where we may not be treating people equally, embracing diversity, including everyone. In old speak, this is as old as humanity. It’s our human nature to make these judgements but it’s also in our human nature to be able to challenge ourselves and deal with these judgements when they are not right.
In Bible speak it’s termed as loving your neighbour as yourself. Now I don’t understand the intricacies of many things that are happening either across the world or close to home. But I do understand that life is much improved when we embrace EDI. If we don’t, like the dandelions, there’s potential for greater outcomes but, unlike the dandelions, outcomes for the worse not the better. The outcome could be the power of love rather than the love of power. I’ll leave you to ponder on that and your default position, while I go and have a re-think about the dandelions – and the dock leaves!
Rev Julie Letts Superintendent Minister The Peak Methodist Circuit