This Year I am Planting Seeds
Seeds.
Hard, lifeless orbs which promise radiant beauty and growth (at least according to the package they come in). All you have to do is push them into the equally lifeless-seeming soil, cover them up, water, and wait.
How could this possibly work?
I only attempted it this year because somebody gave me a bag of wildflower seeds. I appreciated the sentiment — yet there they sat, inanimate, in a bag on my desk, for months. I occasionally glanced at the picture of the flowers on the front; an expression of hope. Hope sealed up in a bag.
During the darkest and coldest days of January I got it in my head to retrieve some old, discarded clay pots from the side of the house, fill them with the half sack of Miracle-Gro potting soil that lay forgotten next to the pots, shove the wildflower seeds about two inches below the soil, cover them with a bit more soil, and wait.
What a waste of time, I thought. But what did I have to lose? The seeds had been free and the clay pots were old.
This will never work.
The next day, it iced and snowed. Temperatures remained below freezing for 51 straight hours. What bad timing. I silently apologized to the little seeds who had been yanked from their warm and dry perch in the bag on my desk and thrown into a cold, damp pot on my porch, right before another "snowmageddon".
Yet even though I’d already established that this would never work, I secretly had hope. I watched for signs of life in the pots every morning. There were none.
Until there was.
These are my seedlings in mid-February.
Photo: Ray Brimble
Here they are again, in late March.
Photo: Ray Brimble
Life! Turns out it doesn't require all that much from us, after all.
A scattering of free seed, some old pots and a half bag of soil you’d forgotten you had. Add water, a bit of sunshine, and guarded expectations. Life does the rest. Seeds are like that. Our job is to gather them, keep planting them, allow ourselves to hope and marvel at their transformation. Every time.
Feature Image: Ylanite Koppens