Where the Kudzu Grows

They did not warn us about the kudzu until after the fact.

Said it would take over everything - the trees, the fences, even the road if we let it. They called it a menace, a weed, a problem. But as a kid riding in the backseat, forehead pressed against the window, I saw nothing but green waterfalls pouring down hillsides. To me, it was beautiful. Unruly, yes - but beautiful.

AI created photo

I didn’t know then that life would come to mirror that vine more than I ever expected.

Because some things - like grief, like love, like resilience - don’t grow in neat rows. They sprawl. They twist. They climb over what you thought would never change and turn it into something you don’t recognize. Something tangled. Something alive.

I’ve lived through a few Kudzu seasons of my own. Times when everything I thought I had under control was suddenly overgrown. Plans I’d planted carefully, overtaken by something wild and unexpected - divorce, job loss, depression, motherhood, heartbreak. Pick a vine, I’ve seen it wind its way through my life.

There were seasons where I couldn’t tell the difference between growth and destruction. I was so busy trying to cut back the mess that I didn’t realize something else was blooming underneath it.

That’s the thing about Kudzu - it’s relentless... and so am I.

People always say, “You’re so strong,” like it’s a compliment. But strength, in my experience, hasn’t always looked graceful. It’s looked like survival. Like curling around whatever light I could find and growing anyway. It’s looked like getting back up with tangled hair, a tired heart, and dirt under my fingernails.

But it’s also looked like beauty - not the polished kind, but the kind you have to look at twice. The kind that sneaks up on you after a storm, or shows up when you finally stop trying to clear the whole field and just sit down in it for a while.

I’ve learned that you can’t always tell the difference between what’s breaking you and what’s building you - not in the moment. Sometimes the thing that overwhelms you is the same thing that transforms you.

Chaos and beauty. Same root. Same vine.

So maybe the goal isn’t always to prune life into something neat. Maybe the goal is to find peace in the overgrowth. To accept that the wild things might know something we don’t. To realize that just because it didn’t go according to plan doesn’t mean it went wrong.

Because where the Kudzu grows?

Something is always growing.