“Look, Granny. Basil sprouting!”
exclaimed my granddaughter as she took me to see the tiny seedlings on the
table in her playroom. Earlier that
day, we had wandered around my yard, hand in hand, looking for sprouting
things. We marveled at the tulips
poking through the leaf mulch, the buds forming on the lilacs, and the
hellebore Lenten Rose blooming on the
sunny south side of the house. The
hellebore is the first thing to bloom in my garden and I am always tickled when
it blooms before Easter.
A few days later, my husband and
I took our granddaughter to Seedy Saturday, a nationwide movement that promotes
the cultivation and preservation of heirloom and endangered varieties of food
crops. Our local event had a kids’
planting table, and before our granddaughter planted her seed in the Styrofoam
cup that she had filled with soil, she cradled it gently in her tiny hand as if
she were in the presence of something holy.
I have a healthy respect for
seeds. Coming from an Italian
background, I grew up with a vegetable garden in the backyard. It was a riot of
plants that produced abundant crops, many of which my father planted from the
seeds he saved annually. Tomato seeds germinated in little pots by the basement
window; others we sowed directly into the ground. From seed to table, I grew up with crunchy carrots, juicy
tomatoes, meaty roman beans, tender lettuce and bitter radicchio that tantalized
(or tortured) my taste buds and nourished my body.
 |
| Image courtesy of KEK064 at freedigitalphotos.net |
Seeds keep up rooted
I used to wonder why my father
kept seeds when it would have been so much simpler and tidier to buy them. But, keeping the seeds was a symbolic
way for my father to stay connected with the land that his family had farmed
for generations in the old country. My father’s method of gardening, including
his insistence on planting according to the phases of the moon, kept us rooted
with our past.
I shared some of this with Mohawk
seed keeper Terrylynn Brant, who sees an intimate connection between the seed,
ancestors and land, and who, like my father plants her crops based on the
moon.
Brant grew up in a family that
was able to maintain its agricultural practices despite government policies
that threatened the traditional agricultural way of life of the communities of
the Haudenosaunee. From an early age, she had a passion for gardening, which
she believes is her gift from the Creator, and she has always been mindful of
the importance of keeping the seeds of her ancestors, some of which, she told
me, go back to time immemorial.
A seed is a sacred thing
For Brant, a seed is a sacred thing and a
metaphor for the innate dignity and goodness of the individual.
“Seeds have their own inherent
responsibility given to them by Creator. It’s basically to grow and to
reproduce themselves. That’s the duty and responsibility they’ve been given…to
continue who they are and what they are” and the seed will always do its best
to honor the task creation had in mind for it.
Brant applies this concept to
people. “The Creator sent us here
as beautiful, perfect beings. He intended us to grow beautiful, to be
compassionate with our fellow man, to share everything we have, to love one
another. And yet, we are the ones
who mess that up…We should look at the seed, and we should be reminded every
time we hold it in our hands what is pure, what is good, what is right, but we
do not.”
There is a genius to a seed that
we miss when we lose contact with the soil and the source of the food on our
table. Sowing a seed, nurturing
its growth, and plucking its fruit off the vine does more than feed our bodies;
it nourishes our spirit.
When we
wonder at basil sprouting or feel our heart leap up at the blooming of the Lenten Rose after a dark winter, we
touch the goodness inherent in our selves, and intuit the possibility for our
own transformation and that of the world. The seed helps us get back to the
garden where we glimpse the perfection and harmony for which we long.
No comments:
Post a Comment