Water Lettuce by Caroline Mellor The water lettuce has thick, spongy leaves and is covered in fine hairs. Its roots hang free so it is not anchored to the ground. (I know this because David Attenborough tells me so, his blue eyes twinkling like fresh water). I think of all the unmoored souls on the planet, cast adrift, roots severed or cut. Not anchored in place. Those who, like me, feel the loss of connection to ancestral home and wisdom, to themselves. The water lettuce has some remarkable adaptations, says David. Its free-floating roots mean it can travel. What a beautiful teaching, I thought, for anyone whose roots have been torn up, for anyone who finds family to be a place of wounding rather than of anchoring. To know that they can travel the flooded rivers and the great highways of life gathering all the minerals and nutrients they need from the water as they go; to know that, like the water lettuce, being rootless, they too have one more rema...
Women's Spiritual Poetry