Planting seeds

 A beautiful, bright, intelligent young girl was given a patch of overgrown land, it was hers to do with what she wanted, but it came with no instructions and she had absolutely no idea where to begin.

Drowning in the overwhelm of responsibility she couldn’t see past the enormity of the task before her, fear rendering her imagination powerless.  She couldn’t think, let alone dream.

So, she set about doing what she thought was right, she began to clear the land.  Perhaps once the tangled mess of overgrown brambles and grasses had gone, she would be able to envisage what to do with her gift.

Cutting and pulling and digging and turning till her land was bare, ‘Perhaps now is the time to decide what to plant?’ she thought, but just as she was about to begin, she noticed that the soil wasn’t fine enough, it was filled with stones and little rocks, and she so wanted everything to be perfect - that was, after all, what she had been taught to aim for - and so she picked up the riddle and began sifting the soil, separating out the debris into neat ordered piles.

She was, as just alluded to, a perfectionist and so it will come as no surprise to learn that she was a really good soil sifter, she worked diligently and took pride in how lovely the ground beneath her feet looked. 

Over time, the people who owned the land around hers, began to notice this too, and one by one, they started bringing her their soil.  She was happy to help - after all that is what good, compliant girls do - yet all the while she helped them, she wasn’t actually planting anything of her own.

Added to which, was an ongoing fight with nature – nothing stayed the same!  Just as the ground was approaching the flawless quality she thought was necessary to begin, it would rain and the soil would clump, or it would be sunny and turn it to dust and then there were the shoots that seemed to sprout overnight and command her attention! Arrrgghh!!!  Some days the wind would blow and disrupt her organisation, sometimes someone would arrive with more stuff to sort and in her distraction she would tell them to ‘just put it over there’ then look round later and discover to her dismay that ‘there’ to them, was atop her beautifully sorted, now buried stones.

Occasionally as she worked, she found a seed and would toss it to the outer edges of her patch, sometimes she remembered to tend it, most times she forgot or neglected it in the prioritising of the shit shovelling in the pursuit of the perfect start.

She wasn’t unobservant, she could see that the people around her were all busy planting and growing and making something of the land that had been gifted to them, but this just made her feel even more inadequate in this game to which she didn’t know the rules but, from what she could figure out, seemed to involve a lot of trial and error, learning as you went along, what would flourish where? A kind of living experiment, that could ultimately result in success, or failure, or a mediocre OK-ness, none of which she was confident to try.  After all, hers was a world of getting it right first time, experimental was far too left field.

Most people were curious as to why, after so many years, her patch of ground was, to all intents and purposes, still barren. They eyed her suspiciously, she was clever, why wasn’t she doing what they were doing?  Surely, she must have worked out what to do by now?  Surely, she wanted her garden to look like theirs?

And yet, there’s the thing.

For whilst she wished she hadn’t spent so long sifting the soil, she also had a deep understanding that she had never actually wanted to grow anything that looked like anybody else’s. 

And when she thought into that she realised that if she didn’t want the results to look like they were ‘expected’ to look, she was, at last, 

free 

to play, 

to discover, 

experiment, 

to marvel in the mystery 

of what would germinate from the seeds she did plant, and what she, and she alone could cultivate those seedlings into. Some wouldn’t make it but Oh! How some would flourish.

 

Today is the Celtic festival of Imbolc.  A time when life begins to awaken from its winter sleep, when we prepare for the warmer, longer days ahead by planting seeds, literally and metaphorically.

And in that vein, I will leave you with a question posed yesterday by a kindred soul,

What is inside that yearns to become?

Imbolc sunrise