Something About Sage

For the last several weeks, one word keeps coming up. At unexpected hours, and always on hikes, the word has taken residence in my mind.

Sage.

Not the cooking “sage with brown butter” kind. Sage, as in sagebrush. The woody-stemmed shrub. The plant that peppers the hills behind my house with fragrant silvery-green leaves.

Sage is common where I live. I see it daily and I always stop to rub the suede-like leaves between my fingers. In part to feel the texture, in part to infuse my fingers with the scent so I can breathe it in after I’ve moved on. But never has the plant stuck in my head like it has lately. It’s begged me to pay attention. I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because it’s springtime and I can’t leave my house without the smell of sagebrush filling my nostrils, spicy and sweet at the same time. The scent of nature’s productivity. A smell that never fails to snap me into the present and out of my everyday cares. The olfactory highway to my senses is always a welcome one.

Maybe it’s because when I first moved from my native Pacific Northwest and traded the spongy, pine needle carpeted soil for the saltine cracker trails of Utah, I thought sage was an herb, not a rugged, wild shrub. My acquaintance with sage started twelve years ago, greeting me trailside on my nearly daily adventures on foot––hiking or running.

Or maybe it is because it was my firstborn’s first word, signaling how often I carried him on my back, hiking amongst the trees and brush when he was a baby. “Sah-dge,” he’d try, when I pointed out the plant, or handed him a fresh sprig over my shoulder. Now, his language, complex and capable, punctuates the ache of how much time has passed, how much he’s grown.

I could come up with a trite analogy. About motherhood and how sage protects more fragile species. Or how it provides habitat… a winter food source for wildlife… or improves water retention by holding windblown snow… But I can’t bring myself to make that meaning. It all feels too cliché. Sage is sage, I tell myself. Don’t embarrass yourself by making it more.

Descending the trail back toward my house, small rocks gently grinding into the dusty dirt under each footstep. I walk, angry with myself for not knowing the reason this plant won’t leave my head.

But then, as if brought by a breeze, my mind opens as I pass another sentinel shrub. From nowhere, the consideration is clear: whether sage has a larger or poetic meaning or not, the sage is there.

It has always been there.

Sage was there when I moved to Utah, drunk on idealism, content to live in a grimy basement apartment, and eager to exhaust my young dog on nearby trails. Sage was there when I processed my mom’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis on long trail runs. Sage was there when I hiked with my son on my back, lost in the throes of early motherhood. Sage was there when I moved 400 miles away during the pandemic, hiking through sagebrush on the exposed foothills in Idaho, shrouded in the fog of both Covid and an ill-fated brain injury. And sage was there when I moved back––it surviving everything from months-long burial under unprecedented snow depths, to scorching stretches of sun-baked drought, and me pushing through my troubles, through everything it means to get by in the world today.

It occurred to me all at once, the meaning lies not in the characteristics of the plant––it’s crackly branches, resilient roots, or fragrant leaves––but the fact that it is there. It always has been. And the one consistent thread tying all of these experiences of “sage” over time is not a poetic analogy. It is me. I was there, too. I still am.

If I have that much reverence for a plant’s ability to persist in a hostile environment, why can I not reflect the same regard on myself? I’m still here. And not just here––out walking amongst the very sage I revere. One foot in front of the other, year after year. Just like the plant, wordlessly carrying on. And that, in and of itself, seems like something. Maybe not poetic, but…persistent. Which may not beg for attention, but at least deserves to be noticed.