Gardening as a Spiritual Exercise #2: Seeds

I am thinking about seeds at the wrong end of the season. It is September, and harvesting is in full swing... beans, squashes, corn, cukes... but then again, in the endings of things is the beginning of new things. On days when I let harvesting go a wee-little-bit toooooooo long, seeds are forming. Seeds for next year. Seeds, seeds, seeds.

Seeds and Gardening.
It is amazing how one seed, if properly nourished and cared for, will produce such an abundance of MORE seeds. That one bean seed, for example. Just one plant has been producing, producing, and producing.  And we have maybe 150 plants! Of course, we eat all the beans or freeze them for later, but still. One seed has the potential to make hundreds  more. The same goes for all the veggies out there. One wee-little-ity-bity mammouth sunflower seed produces a flower head that is 1 to 1 1/2 feet in diameter with hundreds more seeds. One wee-little-ity-bity cucumber seed sets enough fruit with hundreds and hundreds more seeds. And forget about zucchini... don't get me counting THOSE seeds. YIKES. The point is there is tremendous power in just one seed.

So, during the winter as the soil rests and waits, we gardeners take a good deal of time looking over the seed catalogs... must see all the new varieties... must know about the latest trends in better resistance or higher yields or really-truly-honestly organic-but-it-still will-produce-for-you or strange new and different colors (purple beans???? orange tomatoes??? black corn?!). Picking the right seed is step one is getting a great garden, so gardeners are careful... but at the same time, gardeners like to take some risks to try new things. Like this year, I tried eggplant and celery. Mr. Wonderful swears that home grown celery is like nothing you have ever tasted, so, OK, let's try it. And they both grew! Wow. Fun.

We order the seeds, prepare the soil, plant the seeds and wait. Wait and watch. Waiting and watching to see if the choices we made will pan out. Hoping that our expectations are matched with results. While there is a lot of hard work and sweat in gardening, there is also a good measure of faith and hope in the mix, too. Waiting and watching. Working and hoping. Being curious. Having faith for an expected harvest.

Seeds and Spiritual Practice.

A dear friend of mine sends out daily positive thoughts. Today's read: "Your mind is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can sow flowers, or you can sow weeds."

I would bet that in most sacred scriptures of world religions there is a text that in general says that you reap what you sow. Most of us sow a mixed bag of seeds. We do our best, struggle with those naggy-nasty-ugly impulses that are part of human existence, but on the whole, yep, we do our best to be positive/loving/kind. On our best days, we choose love instead of fear. We cool the fires of angry words. We seek the peaceful solution to a challenging problem. We choose to be happy for no apparent reason. On other days, we get lost in a nanosecond to a quick rising of anxiety, or we slowly feed a stew of worry. It truly is a mixed bag. I am trying to be as careful with my words, actions, and thoughts as I am picking seeds for the next season. In my spiritual life as in my gardening life, there is a lot of effort as well as waiting and watching. Working and hoping. Curiosity and faith for an expected harvest of joy and peace.