Spiral Vein Web

On dandelions, graveyards, and a new songwriting workshop

I remember the bitter milk from the cut stem of a dandelion.

The stains on the knees of my leggings as I bent in the grass, the way the yellow flowers would leave an acrid slick on my fingertips.

Early spring before I had names for the birds, when it was all just one bright song unfolding around me, when the air dampened and warmed and the farms came alive with the scent of shorn wool.

The first pink blossoms on the weeping cherry we planted after Grandpa Jack died.

Back then, you could find me in the thicket waiting out an April rainstorm, or by the brook picking out piles of quartz-veined rocks, or running out to meet the neighborhood gang for a game of tag in the graveyard across the street.

My mother tells me I learned to read in Westlawn Cemetery. It was the oldest graveyard in town, with rows of cracked, lichen-filled stones from the 1700s, and it was right outside our door. My mother would say, find me an A, and I’d toddle off to read the engravings, putting a pudgy finger inside the carved letters of Austin and Adams. B was for Babcock, Baker, and Bardwell, buried at six days old in 1804; C for my favorite, Caroline Windsor French, whose milky stone revealed that we shared a birthday, nearly a century apart.

When I got a bit older and no longer needed to learn the alphabet, I’d pick dandelions instead and leave them at the base of every grave. A hundred small suns scattered across the stones as an offering. I didn’t want anyone to feel lonely.

Dandelions are, of course, a common weed—and yet these little godlike structures are an example of sacred geometry, with their perfectly spherical heads stippled with seedpods in a Fibonacci spiral. Radiant with wishes. As a kid, it made sense to me—somewhere in deep cell memory—to offer these particular flowers to the lost souls. As if to say, what is the most common is also the most divine.

As spring hits the land, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dandelions, about life and death, about the intricacy of the earth’s architecture. Fiddleheads unfurling, tiny crystals of dew clinging to a spiderweb, the branching furrows of a meadow vole in the soil. In the middle of the field, in a patch of dead brush, I found a spiraled snail shell, as shockingly white as Caroline Windsor French’s grave.

These are the kinds of structures we’ll be using as guides in my new songwriting workshop SPIRAL VEIN WEB, which I am very excited to be teaching next month. In this three-week virtual gathering, we’ll delve into the sacred geometry of the spiral, the vein, and the web and use these shapes as inspiration for our songs and for our creative practice. Probing deep into the meat of this experience on Earth through the vehicle of its most extraordinary designs.

I’m offering two sessions - one on Thursday mornings, the other on Sunday afternoons. I hope you’ll join me as we metabolize the shape of a dandelion into song, memorializing our time here together like the etchings on a stone.