Thoughts on Seeds.
By Chana R.
We planted native California wildflower seeds in the dirt patch behind our rental unit last Fall. It was to be an El Niño year and sometimes the warmer waters of El Niño bring torrential downpours filling our aquifers ending our drought. At least that is what we all hoped. But this El Nino did not. We did get more rain than the year before and that small amount of rain was just enough to get our seeds started. We also added some encouragement from the garden hose.
I would come home from work and stare at the ground looking for the ‘green beard’ that my partner said would come up in a week and it did.
The bag of seeds was a mixture of natives, we figured we would get California poppies which are a smile of delight with their yellow orange cups but we were not sure what else would come up. The lady at the nursery where we bought the seeds gave us pamphlets on what types of flowers were expected but nothing was better than looking each day to see what shape of green was peeking above the dusty earth.
Then the green took shape into the heavy packages which were busting open with colors, yellows with fuzzy middles, stalks of downy pink and white, baby blue, magenta, and gold. Everyday there was something new, bunches of flowers with names like tidy tips, owl clover, cambridge bells and baby blue eyes.
If you have never seen a lupine coat a dried field with its mini lavender ladder, it is a sight worth savoring.
I spend a lot of time on the freeway in traffic and coming up to that driveway after asphalt fatigue looking at that random garden mended me in ways I didn’t realize were broken. The garden went through phases, had a resident gopher who saladed her way through the tidy tips like a cartoon, provided cover and food for a plethora of birdlife including a very lonely male mockingbird who kept us up at 3am with his Romeo musical serenade. For the rest of my life I will remember this time, this garden and the gracious sustenance I received from it.
I don’t really know if we would have attempted this garden if it wasn’t for the promise of rain. And I wonder if the promise of success or even what success might look like, is more about just being breathtakingly present to the seeds we planted ‘just in case’.
Perhaps, my life /
if taken carefully with open eyes/
is just like that warmer ocean weather system of chaos
that sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t but always offers.