It wasn’t a technique I had tried before.

Bathing the greens in boiling water, poured over rather than plunged in, gave the dish a gentleness that softened the bitter bite of stems and leaves. “A stalwart of the Greek taverna, this rustic dish of braised wild greens is packed with flavor and, I swear, makes you feel healthier just by looking at it,” writes Yasmin Khan in Ripe Figs describing horta. Assertive escarole, minerally spinach, leathery kale I gathered at the farmers’ market and complemented with wild greens I foraged from the land around my house. Wild chives that never stopped growing through winter. Pungent garlic mustard, green ruffles peeking out from dead leaves. Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, its entire body from root to blossom edible and nourishing for the liver. 

My first spring on the East Coast in a decade insists on reconnection. Reconnection with the plants allowing themselves to be visible through lawn and rocks and highway medians and forest floors. I’m learning their names and behaviors from many places: books, online classes, the iNaturalist Seek app, local wise women. As I’m noticing, learning, gathering these plants, I’m feeling what makes them wild. While so much wilderness – forests, reefs, entire species and ecosystems – rapidly shrinks, these plants require no cultivation or effort. You can’t stop them even if you wanted to. We call them weeds. Their medicine runs deep. They ask me questions. What’s wild in me? What’s always been there, protruding through cracks until it can’t be ignored?

My voice, for one. I’ve always had jobs (travel writer, analyst, product marketer, organizational leader) where using my voice was part of the job description. And yet, if I’m honest with myself, I often struggled to feel safe speaking my full truth or even connecting with what it was, despite earnest invitations from my partners. That self-doubt was my own herbicide, applied with best intentions to protect myself but ultimately stifling something vital. Luckily, my voice – like these plants – insists and perseveres, rooting down to the source of what I’m feeling and sprouting up to share it. (You, dear readers, are the foragers listening, which I deeply appreciate.)

Back to cooking. Departing from Khan’s recipe but honoring her spirit, I make a boiling broth of an alien-looking reishi mushroom and use that to bathe the greens. First the toughest ones, stems saved to sauté in omelets or soup, and then adding the more delicate leaves that need less time to cook. I drain them, let them cool, gently squeeze out the liquid and place them in a bowl. Lemon juice, salt, pepper, my best olive oil. And then, another departure, one that feels right for the season: I grate fresh horseradish root on top, a sting that wakes you up and jolts you into spring. 

It’s a traditional root used for Passover Seder, the occasion for which I prepare this dish, an opportunity to reconnect with cousins from my mother’s family who I haven’t seen in years (and in some cases, decades). My mother died when I was four. I have a memory of her funeral; I don’t know if it’s accurate but the feeling is real. In the memory, I’m sitting in the front pew of the synagogue, wailing uncontrollably, with a growing awareness that my grief was making people uncomfortable. The story and the shame that sprung from it is a survival tactic – I need the protection of my tribe and I can’t afford to push them away. But the story has outlived its season. The shame I felt expressing deep emotion lest it alienate people has, I realize, become an obstacle to being present and feeling free. 

I leave that story and pack up the greens in my grandmother’s china. I wear a jumpsuit I wore to her funeral in 2019, transformed with new life by an artist in the East Village. I carry a beaded purse worn by her mother, my great-grandmother Sarah, my namesake. Talismans of love and celebration.

We arrive at the Seder, the ultimate symbolic meal, where every dish, word, song, action carries intention and lineage. It is beautiful, a loving container for my wild greens and wild feelings. What I experience is the opposite of the impression in my old memory: so much emotion, welcomed and flowing freely from women and men, young and old. The context of COVID for this family, like many families, meant losing elders without the traditional rituals to mourn. This gathering is a safe space to feel – not just sadness but laughter too, with jokes and poems and kids’ performances. Spring is here, unstoppable, welling up from deep within.