There is something so blastedly beautiful about a seed! At this time of year, I am quite happy to sit down under a good lamp and pick apart seed heads of Mexican sunflowers, or separate fluff from the achenes popping out of a milkweed pod. It’s a process that only requires patience, maybe a pair of tweezers, and closed windows so nothing blows out of reach. It goes like this: focus, notice, wonder, sort. Then stash some away for next year’s garden, or for potential gifts, or even just for no particular use at all (inevitably, I discard a portion of my carefully stored seeds every year).
Something about the positiveness of the gesture. Optimism. That there will be a day when these seeds come in handy, that I’ll be around--come spring--to unfold the paper envelope or pop open the film container (remember those?) and pour a few into my palm to tuck into a flat of dampened potting mix or toss into a fluffed-up garden bed. Optimism that the gesture has its own inherent value, and that even without witnesses, it is good for the world.
I was plucking and sorting seeds recently, on a day when I knew that I had taken in too much news. I had allowed the tragedy—no, the catastrophe—of another mass shooting and the terrible reality of people leaving their homes in great numbers to weigh on me, heavily. And worse, this had stoked the fire of anxiety that forever sits as a glowing ember in my belly: my ancestral inheritance, the roots of which stretch behind me, possibly even back beyond the grandparents I knew, refugees themselves in the first decades of the twentieth century.
We can’t keep absorbing the sorrow, the “bad news,” without taking breaks like I did that day, under the focused beam of a lamp—breaks to rest in the astounding fact of a seed, ingenious package for another year of life, for continuation. At least I can't.
Something about the positiveness of the gesture. Optimism. That there will be a day when these seeds come in handy, that I’ll be around--come spring--to unfold the paper envelope or pop open the film container (remember those?) and pour a few into my palm to tuck into a flat of dampened potting mix or toss into a fluffed-up garden bed. Optimism that the gesture has its own inherent value, and that even without witnesses, it is good for the world.
I was plucking and sorting seeds recently, on a day when I knew that I had taken in too much news. I had allowed the tragedy—no, the catastrophe—of another mass shooting and the terrible reality of people leaving their homes in great numbers to weigh on me, heavily. And worse, this had stoked the fire of anxiety that forever sits as a glowing ember in my belly: my ancestral inheritance, the roots of which stretch behind me, possibly even back beyond the grandparents I knew, refugees themselves in the first decades of the twentieth century.
We can’t keep absorbing the sorrow, the “bad news,” without taking breaks like I did that day, under the focused beam of a lamp—breaks to rest in the astounding fact of a seed, ingenious package for another year of life, for continuation. At least I can't.