Seeds Doing What Seeds Do

A little seed

A little soil

A little sweat

A little toil

A little waiting

A little weeding

A little compost

A little feeding

A little sunshine

A little shower

A little miracle

A little flower

It was three weeks ago the box was delivered. It contained three plastic pots, two big ones and a smaller one. There was a block of compost, something you put in a bucket, added warm water and it soaked it all up and multiplied. And there were three packets of seeds with instructions on how to sow them. It was a Facebook subscription for growing your own vegetables. Scrolling down through the comments it was pointed out to me that all of the things in the box were available at a garden centre at a fraction of the price and Youtube had a whole host of clips on how to sow seeds. It wasn’t rocket science, was it?

My dad would have turned in his grave at the thought of subscribing to a box scheme to grow vegetables. He had green fingers and an allotment and a garden shed full of tools. He gave me a wee strip beside the shed to grow radishes. Apparently, you can’t go wrong with growing radishes. I don’t know whether I didn’t go wrong. The memory fades at that point.

I had the box and all its contents. It was a sunny day so I spread everything out on the patio table. I would like to say I followed the instructions but I didn’t. I didn’t have any leftover seeds to plant later because I had used them all. Three seeds six centimetres down was read as six seeds three centimetres down. I’m not worried. I have rounded up a few empty pots and there is a big bag of compost leaning beside the back door. I can replant the extras.

I am impressed. After almost three weeks I have a pot of spinach shoots, a pot with very fine blades of spring onions. Yesterday I had three sprouting beans. I say yesterday because one of them has gone. Something bit the sprout off of one of them. There is a stalk and a dribble of roots so I am hoping it will survive. I have poked around a bit to see if beans 4, 5 or 6 are still in there.

I am just so impressed that something is actually growing in the pots. I feel like a very proud mother. There is a definite sense of achievement. I don’t think I actually like spinach but I will deal with that when there is spinach to harvest.

I was looking at the spinach pot with a dozen or so baby shoots when they first popped up and I was thinking about how things that are planted, seeds, grow. It’s what they are designed to do. In every packet of seeds there are probably a few dud ones. They look like seeds, they are seeds, but some of the DNA, the growing instructions are not there inside it. But most of them are not dud seeds. They grow.

I was thinking about a friend of mine and the soft soil of a heart. Words tossed in carelessly by other people, and by themselves, had taken root and sprouted. ‘Useless’ was in the mix somewhere, and ‘I wish you were more like your sister,’ and ‘Can’t you do anything right?’

I am halfway through my creative writing degree course (honours). This particular year has stretched me quite a bit and made me think about throwing in the towel more than once. There is a voice that tells me I have reached the pinnacle of my ability and I should quit while I’m ahead. It has been all about writing reports and research and referencing, none of which I do well. The words are on my lips to explain why my grades have slipped – ‘I can’t write reports.’

Did you see it? That seed tossed into the plant pot of my heart? ‘I can’t write reports.’ How long do I have to wait for the shoots of that to appear? Not long. The marks are in for the final assessment and, yes, I really can’t write reports, the grade confirms it. Except that ‘I can’t write reports’ is not true. I can write them. The grade is not a bad grade. It’s just not the high grade I was expecting. It’s a grade I can improve on with a little more time and effort, a little more careful reading and note taking, a little more asking of clarifying questions. It doesn’t have to be ‘I can’t write reports.’

I have taken to not saying those words because all I can see in my mind’s eye is that seed swinging an arc and dropping into my heart soil. I don’t want that word to take root and grow.

If the words I say to myself and the words I say to others have something about the seed in them, it makes sense to be careful.

Words cannot be unsaid, and they cannot be unheard.

Best not to say some words at all.