Planting seeds

Spring!  The seeds I've planted are sprouting....that sweet new green that can't be duplicated in any other medium.  Soon I will have sweet peas, black oil sunflowers, cosmos...a myriad of fruit, vegetables, flowers, vines.  All having started as very small, seemingly lifeless seeds created from previous life now perished.  Such short glorious lives!  And such miracles of perseverance...seeds over 30,000 years old have germinated and grown into perfectly normal plants that make seeds for the next generation.  

These tiny bits of life yearn towards the sun without thought of self...without thought at all.  There is something so heartbreakingly yielding about an annual plant...light and air needy, helpless, fragile; and yet providing nourishment for bees and humans, giving us oxygen to breathe, and flowering brilliantly in its need to reproduce and, unwittingly, delighting all our senses.  All, every nanosecond, without rational awareness, desire, or expectation.

The robustness of these plants is astonishing considering they are tiny factories made basically from light and water.  How delicate their parts are: tissue paper leaves that easily tear, roots are fragile hairs that can't bear to be disturbed, stems that rarely survive being bent but more often than not, the determined plant soldiers on...repairing what can be repaired and replacing what can't.  Putting its energy into roots, leaves, flowers, and fruit at the appropriate times...growing and shedding according to season.  All driven strictly by genetic coding...just being what it is, doing what it does.

Something deep inside me really responds to these short-lived plants that make the best possible use of all resources to fulfill their destiny.  There are very profound lessons here for me.

Tiny sunflower

From one seed will come thousands...

And happy chickens.