Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

This is a photograph I took of a bitter dock, a common weed in New Hampshire. This one stands as a sentinel at the foot of my driveway. The bitter dock is foreign to our state and, like many other immigrants, is considered to be an invasive pest; however, in the more-than-human world, it is held in high esteem by both birds and animals, who hanker after its seeds.

At first glance, my photograph only captures a moment, as Claude Monet set out to do with his paintings. But his work has become more than that: Revealing a depth revered by people all over the world.

In terms of my own life, my bitter dock picture is equally profound.

When I took this shot, I meant only to document the bitter dock’s colorful autumn garb. But the longer I looked at it, the more memories it brought back, starting when I was a little boy of six. That’s when the loggers came to clear-cut the majestic stand of white pines adjacent to my home, changing the whole ecology of my personal landscape.

Cutting these massive trees opened up a clear view of the sky, inviting in a smorgasbord of sunshine-seeking species, including bitter docks and high-bush blueberries. After a few years, my mother and I were able to go there berry-picking, gaining access to the land through the same gap in the stonewall where the bitter dock now guards my driveway.

It was a different time.

When those white pines were harvested around 1950, timber had monetary value, while land in rural New Hampshire had virtually none. A few years later, this allowed my father to buy the land under the trees for the princely sum of one hundred dollars — land that soon would become mine.

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Over the years, mixed hardwoods grew back where the pines once stood, gradually shading out the blueberry bushes and restricting the bitter dock to a roadside plant. For the last fifty years, I have shared this land with the maples, oaks, and birches, cutting their wood to feed my woodstove. I am aware that, as a human being, I am so much more of an ecological threat than my little bitter dock plant could ever be.

While many consider this little plant to be a pesky weed, for me, it represents a higher truth. It reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon, a wordless talk he gave to his disciples by holding up a white flower. Only one person understood his message, signaling his approval by smiling.

Within Buddhism, the Flower Sermon signifies the direct transmission of wisdom without words; it is based on first-hand experience rather than rational creeds, intellectualism, or analysis.

The photo I took of this bitter dock is my wordless transmission of this truth: It represents the primordial cycles of nature, grounded in my real-life experience during the short span of my 78 years on Earth.

I honor this wordless transmission by smiling.