clovers

an essay about clovers, consciousness, and coming home to yourself

The first time I searched for clovers, I was lying in the garden of my grandparents’ home, cheek pressed to the grass. I must’ve been three or four. My mother, crouched beside me, coaxed me to listen. “You can hear it grow,” she said. She weaved her hand through a patch taller than the rest, her voice low and conspiratorial. “We’re looking for a four-leaf clover,” she told me. “One in every ten thousand is lucky.”

I was spellbound. Even at that age, I think I knew somewhere inside my tiny chest that this was what I’d always be doing. Looking for signs of the mystical, the invisible, the more-than-meets-the-eye hidden in plain sight.

Years pass. Another country. Another version of me.

It’s 4 a.m. in Bristol, and something wakes me. A vibration. Somewhere in the distance, a sound system is thrumming through the earth like a call. I dress quickly, wrap an oversized scarf around my shoulders, fill a water bottle, and step out into the still-blue dark.

The streets are half-asleep, but I’m pulled forward. Down narrow lanes. Through a tunnel tagged with messages like prayers. I follow the sound, lose it briefly to the growl of a generator, then find it again. Cresting a hill, I arrive to see a hundred people scattered across a grassy knoll. A makeshift DJ booth. Giant speakers booming techno into the sky.

Someone walks up to me immediately, parched. He gestures toward my bottle. “Of course,” I say, handing it over. When he finishes drinking, he presses a little white pill into my palm. A thank you.

I take it without thinking, settle down into the grass beside someone I half-know. My fingers begin to idly stroke the blades. And then, suddenly, I see one. A clover. Four leaves. Then another. Then another. Seven in total, all nestled in a single patch beneath me like a private miracle.

I fold six of them into my notebook and give one to my neighbour, giddy. I’m high. The music is inside me. The sun is coming up and everything feels full, like the veil between the seen and unseen has grown thin. My heart is pounding with joy.

Reality, I’ve learned, is never neutral. It bends through the lens of the mind that’s perceiving it. What you see, what I see, it’s never the same thing. We’re all wandering around inside our own maps, shaped by family, culture, memory. When we insist that ours is the only truth, we miss each other entirely.

Fast forward again. Tuscany, Italy. A villa hidden among olive trees. I’m here with a lover, invited to help with the harvest. For days, we rake olives from branches and into nets, the work sweet and repetitive, the kind that exhausts the body just enough to quiet the mind.

On the fifth morning, I froth milk over the stove and carry two coffees outside. The children from the house circle around me, their chatter light and skittish as birds. One of them, a two-year-old girl, calls me “Honey.” She can’t pronounce Vienda.

I feel the now-familiar pull. My eyes land on a darker patch of grass. I set the coffee down and kneel.

“What are you doing, Honey?” she asks.

“I’m looking for a four-leaf clover,” I reply.

And there it is. Right in front of me. Then another. The adults gasp. I hand both to my lover. He presses them into the back of his journal like evidence.

There’s magic everywhere if you know how to see. But so many of us have forgotten. We’ve been taught to expect danger, to defer to logic, to stay in line. We’ve been told that surrender is foolish, softness is weakness, and intuition is unreliable. And so, we trade our knowing for safety. Our voice for approval. Our inner wisdom for the illusion of control.

But eventually, the body remembers what the mind has tried to override.

Just days ago, here in New York, the city was swelling with that first hot breath of spring. We had plans to board a ferry across the Hudson but missed it. The next wouldn’t arrive for hours. So we walked back towards home.

We’d both been cooped up working, he on a book that’ll be published later this year, me on a course called The Way She Knows, which had just opened for earlybird enrolments. We need sunlight. Air. Movement.

As we meander along the river, I stop. “Wait,” I said, “I want to check something.”

I crouch beside a small patch of green growing along the sidewalk. Something had tugged at me, quiet but insistent. I peer closer and blink. The biggest four-leaf clover I’ve ever seen. Massive. Radiant. Impossible. I show him.

“What the heck!” he says. “It’s like you knew it was there.”

I smile, gleeful and press it gently between two bills in my wallet. Because of course, it was there. Of course, I knew.