Nature is my teacher. And as I age it becomes even more of a spiritual teacher.
By looking at the life of a seed, I have learned to have hope when things aren’t working fast enough for me, or it feels like they aren’t. Of course, things are working but at their own speed. So in the vast snowscape of winter, I always think about the little seeds percolating under the ground, lying dormant but always evolving. There is always something percolating out there where we can’t see it. It appears when it is meant to appear.
Going further on looking at seeds as a teacher I began to realize that a seed must destroy itself as it is to become what it will be.
The little sunflower seed is placed in the ground by a bird. It has known one life, to be a seed in a shell.But one day it bursts out of its shell and sprouts. And so it becomes a sprout. And now it knows itself as a sprout. But then it grows into a tall sunflower and it lives its life as a sunflower. And then it begins again.
To think of my own life, I had to let the self I knew or identified with be destroyed–over and over– just like the shell of that seed. I couldn’t imagine what would sprout, but something even bigger and better did. A breakup that had me on my knees but eventually led me to leaving one home for another and that led to Martyn and then the farm. Or when we decided to leave the old farm–a place I had nurtured and loved and identified with–but by leaving it led to something even bigger here in Maine.
I used to have a saying I often incorporated into art: leaves know more than I do. It came to me when I was deep in grief over that break up I mentioned. I was having trouble letting go and I began to feel deep empathy for leaves and admire their ability to just...let go, fall, drift, land, dry up, crumble, and then nurture the soil. They too had to be destroyed to begin another stage of existence.
