Sowing seeds of possibility, hope and flavour

Sharing a beautiful Seed Ritual for your inner and outing sowings

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

We began our Moving Mountains Journey on Friday, tapping into the energy of the Spring Equinox, and it was beautiful opening to the next thirteen weeks of exploration and creativity. As part of the ceremony we planted metaphorical seeds of possibility. I had planned to include this but hadn’t found a ritual that called to me. And then right on cue, one of the writers I follow here on Substack, posted a beautiful seed ritual last weekend. Thank you

Jo Taylor

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Here it is if you would like to use it or just read the lovely words.

The Seed Ritual

As a container for our journeying, we are working with the story of La Loba (Bone Woman/ Wolf Woman) from the first chapter of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and in this chapter she writes that the symbols of seed and bone are very similar. And that the “Bone Woman home place contains direct knowing about seedlings, root stock, the seed corn of the world.” For women, that knowing is carried in the ovaries, “where all seed stock is laid down before she is even born.”

To have seed is to have the means to repair any havoc or to re-sow after devastation. To have seed means to have the key to life. The cycles of seed germination, growth, blossom, then to seed again, is a dance with life, then with death, then to dance into life again. I think about this beautiful cycle as I begin sowing the seed for this year’s veggies and flowers. I think about how we often take seed for granted and how vital it is to collect and protect it - especially native and heritage, untampered-with seed.

This week I listened to a talk about the ecology of deserts, hosted by the LandArt Agency & Collective in their Creative Ecologies series. The director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust (MDLT), Kelly Herbinson, was one of the panel and she spoke about their seed bank and the importance of it for restoration. The quote below is taken from an extended interview with Kelly on the MDLT website. You can listen to or read the whole interview here.

Here at MDLT, we have this really great plant conservation program that started with this nursery growing native plants and collecting seed to grow our plants. At some point, we realized the importance of collecting seed to bank it for future restoration, in part because we've had situations like big swaths of our land burn in wildfires, and because the desert isn't fire adapted, that often means that a lot of the plants won’t come back. Joshua trees are a great example, they're not fire adapted. If they burn down, if they burned hot enough, they won't come back. So we realized at some point we need to be banking seed from our land so that we can restore it if something happens.

For while now I have been following the work of The Lemon Tree Trust. The charity implements gardening initiatives in displaced communities and refugee camps to create employment and restore dignity and purpose, by providing seeds, plants and encouraging community gardens. The bulk of their work is in the refugee camps of the Kurdistan desert region of Iraq, and they partner with organisations across the world to bring gardens to displaced communities.

Seed is a potent symbol of possibility, of hope and of restoration. Seed embodies the life/death/life mother in her most ancient and and her most modern form.

Both seed and bone are pretty indestructible. A seed may not germinate but it still exists as a seed, as possibility, as potential. Even crushed in your pestle and mortar, it is transformed but not destroyed.

Clarissa PE writes “I am always taken by how deeply women like to dig in the earth. They plant bulbs for spring. They poke blackened fingers into mucky soil, transplanting sharp-smelling tomato plants. I think they are digging down to the two-million-year-old woman.”

In introducing her beautiful ritual Jo Taylor writes:

The more uncertain the world feels the more I want to plunge my hands into the earth to feel something life-giving. We grow a lot of vegetables at home, and whenever I prepare the beds and pots ready to sow seeds, I think of the soil breaking down my troubles and turning them into nutrients that might help something grow.

As an extension of that, the ritual is a symbolic practice for when everything feels too much and you need something to disperse your thoughts and bolster your spirit at the same time. It’s also a practice of hope and patience. It’s not just about physically growing a plant, it’s cultivating a nurturing space within. To push a seed into the earth is to hope. To care for the seeds within us—our desires and ideas—is an act of faith in ourselves. In life and in nature this has never felt more important.

I know for sure that as the light increases, and the soil warms, I’m getting itchy to be outside with my hands in the earth. I’m reaching for two-million-year-old woman and that ‘knowing’. I’m so ready to sow seeds, to start the life cycle again, in both my literal and my metaphorical garden.

This year I bought my seeds from Real Seeds, organic non-hybrid, non-GM varieties, trying out some new-to-me veggies such as Aztec Broccoli. I am growing for flavour too, which is something we seem to have lost these days in the visual perfection of the supermarket shelf. Remember how a juicy tomato really tastes?

So until next time … Are you ready to sow your seeds of possibility and maybe tomatoes? Do try out Jo’s ritual and see what germinates.

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