Dear , , , seeds are very patient something I try to learn from them seeds can remain dormant maintaining a potent stillness until the conditions favor that spongy next thing when they unfurl I never get tired of seeing that happen "how they push through the soil (how the moon pulls them up and out) a watermelon seedling may as well be a whale it surfaces with such force before they exert that force, they're so good at waiting I doubt they experience it as waiting i was talking with grace paley about patience one afternoon in her farmhouse in Vermont she said people had often told her she was patient. she never thought of herself as patient she said i.e. she didn't think of herself as enduring anything she just wanted to see what happened next when i am happiest – at least one happiness – it is that happiness of the patience that is not endurance a patience that reads in the body more as curiosity not so much suffering (being carried under) as being poised :: ,,, how can the seed possibly know anything then about form. they move to the next space that promises sustenance but a seed is like a time traveler they can stay in the same space, but their travel is into the time when water and temperature is right. :: and of course they do move too. they stow away in ships and cross whole oceans. and they use us to move them. hitching on to our pants legs, dog fur, etc. passing through the entrails of birds. like the pittosporum berries (that look like tiny oranges) in the meadow right now so they can be lifted into the sky and then dropped with perhaps enough force to make enough contact with whatever soil to burrow into it ~ the ones who land in lucky ways are maybe the ones who stand a chance at sprouting. i find them on leaves, on rocks, and sometimes in the soil. and i had never thought about how those last ones are the ones that have a chance to germinate. :: Small pockets of scorch and then, in the same breath, this: green blade, pungent sponge between my fingers: :: generate, re- [ , , , , , , , , ,] emergence, re [, , , , , , , , , ,] , Some squirrels socked away (as my father would say) seeds of a silene/campion flower in Russian permafrost , , , you can read more about it here: hello again that story has everything: squirrel larders, woolly mammoths, natural anti-freeze those squirrels, couldn't know we'd be digging up their burrows many thousand years later rooting through their cache of seeds and fruits, they def couldn't have known their burrows were about to be blown shut and freeze over and there's the date palm, dormant for 2000 years. that was excavated, and then held for another forty or so years, and then it was sprouted. it is now a tree, named Methuseleh after the oldest person in the bible. i have a date seed on my mantle (from these impossibly beautiful dates i got at the market last Saturday – they're this very buttery yellow i could just look at them and never eat them, but of course i ate them) anyway, i look at that seed sitting there I have been wanting to germinate it just to see if it would sprout. but now that i've read about the Judean date, I think i will save it for 2000 years. , , , , , , , , ,
