An Invitation to the Seeds

“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman
of the highest order.” ~ Wendell Berry

I offer these seeds as an invitation to you to join our little group as we reweave ourselves back into the big story of how our people became a people and ultimately, perhaps, to grow ourselves into ancestors worth descending from for a people beyond our time who we will never meet. I am inviting you to plant these seeds and by so doing plant yourself in this time and this place, slowing and becoming recognisable to your old ones and to create a place in your days for re-membering some of their ways of being themselves back into the world. 

For now, go out and fetch soil from where you live – you will need to be able to tell the story of the soil to your growing sprouts so they learn the feel of home on their roots so don’t purchase soil from someplace else. Where possible, add the soil to pots or vessels whose origin stories you know: where the tree grew before it was cut down and by whom and who the carver was that fashioned it into the bowl or where the clay was dug and who fired it and how it came to you.  Be willing to tell all these stories to the growing shoots as they rise to be licked by the warmth of the rays of Spring sunshine. 

After you have placed these tiny, amazing, living, pulsing vessels of culture into the soil you harvested into the vessels whose stories you can tell and you cover over the seeds with soil – sing them a mourning song that blesses them for the lives they lived that you are now asking them to shed and to die so that new life can be coaxed from the old life. Water them with your tears of gratitude for the life you have been given and wait with anticipation for the faces of the new shoots to appear. Endeavour to have this part done by the time we first gather online. 

As you wait, teach yourself the story of these seeds, chile pepper: Solanaceae Capsicum annuum, variety “Ring of Fire”, from Jason Stewart by way of Tamar Organics, Cornwall. You now know that tiny part of the big story of the chile pepper. But what about before that, who were their people? How were those people recognisable as people of the chile and not people of wheat or barley? And by what twisted road did they travel to these lands? Begin to tell this amazing story to anyone who will listen so that as your shoots become vines and those vines become bushes and start to flower you can tell those beautiful white flowers the secret of their beauty and when the slender green chiles begin to descend down from the wreath of the dried flower you will know what songs to sing them to inflame their passion for them to grow spicy and pungent. You will be re-membering yourself to the ancestors of your seeds.