Sensing the Seeds

Listening into infinity, hoping for a thaw

The snow is blank and quiet. I go out in it. Crunching through layers of billions of tiny crystals that have danced down from the sky to cover the land. I step unaware of the rotting leaves, moss, lichen, stones, seeds and billions of microbes and critters hidden under the huge blanket.

I see porcupine tracks leading into a small stone cavern. Coming close I see it is empty and something within me feels hollow.

What within me wants to be filled? There were times when the food rations grew thin this time of year. There was that year I lived in an old studio with no insulation and ate only eggs from the hen house. I could sense my ancestors leaning into the fire, chewing on dried morsels, slowly. The flash memory of the hunt, when the deer, antelope, bear and moose took us in, eye to eye, right before they fell. Our hands opening up their bodies and carefully transforming them into food, clothing, shelter, tools, and stories.

Following the deer, our feet would have known familiar trails from woodland to meadow, stream to river to ocean. Nestled in a pouch would have been the seeds. Seeds gathered one by one in the last days of Summer. Fingers touching the surface of each one with hopes for life in the Spring and Summer to come.

In these strange times I find I am hungry, empty, seeking. I walk further up the mountain under the snow covered canopy of beech trees. My hunger brings me back to a time before the weather started to change wildly. I stood in bright sunshine placing seeds in little soil blocks in my greenhouse. Then daily tended to the mysterious arising of hundreds of little beings, their two little leaves popping forth, within months becoming tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, kale, beets, flowers, herbs, beauty, abundance. My hands, back and legs lived to care for them, and my tongue and belly celebrated. I watched the seed heads bob in the fall winds, scattering their potential into the brown blanket of earth. My body came to know infinity through the seeds.

It is almost Imbolc. The halfway point between Winter and Spring. There are birds beginning to sing. I clamber over an old log and see icicles dripping tiny circles into the snow crust. I pause and listen quietly to hear the seeds sleeping beneath the ground. I am longing for them to restore my sense of promise, to fill my emptiness with seeds of wisdom, seeds of faith. They feel buried beneath the frozen hearted business as usual of humans in power, sitting at desks, deciding the fate of all of us with the stroke of pens, buttons pushed, triggers pulled.

I trudge through the snow until darkness heads me home. I thaw out near the fire. I ponder, What will thaw the frozen hearted? How can we show them that something wild and free and profoundly abundant is waiting to emerge when the sun returns. I am starting to sense a little seed inside my cavern. A potential for deep change, coming with the green leaflets of Spring. Are you ready to emerge and grow to feed the future?