Today, in anticipation of the 4th when we will have company in our yard, I walked out to my back garden to assess. I took stock of what’s blooming and what needs a little spruce up. After 30 years of tending this plot, I find the earth underneath my feet incredibly grounding.

As I walked out I thought about the country. I have been tending this garden for a very long time, and what started as ambition and dirt has grown into something that genuinely takes my breath away some mornings when I peer out my window. Plants my colleague Lane gave me from her garden, daffodils my dad dug up from my childhood home. There are plants that I had forgotten about that come back stronger than before.

The garden also has weeds. Lots of them! They are relentless. I pull them and they return. I pull them again and they return again. There is no permanent solution to a weed. There is only the ongoing commitment to keep after them because the moment I stop paying attention to them, they take over.

What I’ve learned after thirty years is that the most heartbreaking thing in a garden isn’t the weeds themselves. It’s what happens to the plants that used to be around them. Good, strong, beautiful plants can get crowded out as they are struggling to get the light and the water and the space they need to thrive. The plants can’t survive, because something else is taking up too much room or being overpowering and aggressive.

That’s what I think about this July 4th.

There are a lot of Americans right now who are being crowded out. People who are struggling to find the light. People who have everything it takes to thrive and simply aren’t being given the room to do it.

Fortunately, that’s not all I see.

I also see what happens in a perennial garden when it’s bountiful and gorgeous. Some plants spread and multiply faster than the space allows. I suddenly have more plants than the space can hold, so I am able to share my garden with my friends. The garden gives, and the giving feels good, and next year my friend’s garden has a little piece of love from me blooming in it.

That is also America. On this Fourth of July, I am holding both things at once. The weeds and the blooms, the struggle and the abundance, the honest worry and the stubborn hope. I know that hope is not a feeling but a practice like my meditation practice. It’s believing that what you plant matters, even if it takes years.

That feels like as good a definition of patriotism as any I’ve come across. Happy Fourth of July. Go find a weed and pull it out. And then another. And another.