Faith in a Seed
Plant some hope this fall
Humans think that fall is a time of ending, slowing down, darkness and dying. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fall is the time of new beginnings, of planning ahead, of new life and hope. It’s Nature’s seed time.
The habit of spring planting is a uniquely human custom. Nature plants her seeds at the opposite pole of the year. Just look around you now, take a stroll anywhere, down a country lane or around a city block. How many seeds will you walk past—hundreds of thousands? Millions?
Fall dandelions create a silver globe of seeds, more than two hundred on every stalk. Every single goldenrod floret produces a single seed. Every single tiny white Queen Anne’s lace flower produces a seed.
Along the fringes of parking lots and shopping malls, milkweed, thistle, and jewelweed are going to seed now, next year’s flowers getting ready for spring. The center of every sunflower, daisy, and black-eyed Susan is a treasure trove of seeds. In the meadow, dogwood berries line the trails. Wild grapes festoon the branches overhead.
Not to mention the forest harvest. Acorns carpet the forest floor. Apple seeds inside bright fruits clunk down to the ground. Fall is the time when a wee baby acorn might begin the process of metamorphosing into a giant stretching a hundred feet into the air.
These days, on my autumn strolls I’ve taken to doing what I call seed-bombing. As I walk, I collect wild apples, black walnuts, acorns, spruce cones—any native seeds. I rescue the seeds that have little hope of coming to anything—the acorns that fell onto blacktop, the apples clustered too tightly together for all to survive, the fir cones that litter the corner of a parking lot. I stick them in my pocket, and then later I throw them around in likely spots—along roadsides, in thickets or meadows, anywhere they might have even a faint chance of germinating.
Will that black walnut sprout? Will my apple grow to feed generations of deer and turkeys? Could I be midwife to an oak? I’ll never know. I throw my seeds high in the air, they disappear into the thicket, and who knows what will happen.
Of all of nature’s immense harvest, only a few seeds sprout, and most don’t survive for long. They’re munched by caterpillars, browsed by deer, weakened by fungi, stepped on by humans. But a few, a very few, survive their perilous infancy. Slow growers, trees--they don’t do anything in a hurry. It may take years for the youngster to grow ankle-high, then knee-high, then shoulder-high. And then? The sky’s the limit. If it survives the deer and the turkeys and the squirrels, the bugs and the lawnmowers, that acorn or black walnut or wild cherry might be the one that turns into a mammoth tree, a magnificent being that will long outlive you.
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,” said Henry David Thoreau. “Convince me that you have a seed
there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
So don’t just watch nature, the ultimate gardener, at her work of planting. Pitch in and do some planting yourself! All those uncountable numbers of seeds will lie waiting under the snow. What will the spring of 2025 bring us? It depends on what gets planted in the fall of 2024.
This year has been a tough one. The summer was long and hot and filled with despair. But August brought the winds of change, and now the woods and fields, highways and byways are ripe with next year’s possibilities. What seeds can you sow between now and November 5?
Dear Friends,
Are you excited but worried about the election of 2024 and wondering what to do about it? I hope you’ll continue to check out The Optimistic Activist.
Every week I post some ideas for doing something. How to get out the vote, spread the word, and support progressive candidates. Ideas for simple but effective activism. As easy, as practical, as do-able as I can make them.
Together, I think, we could really make a difference.
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.”
--Noam Chomsky
A brilliant allegory!!