Back when I wrote “taller than a tree,” the post which introduced the lovely and ancient Magnolia grandiflora and chronicled my personal relationship to one very special Magnolia tree, I was a little disappointed not to find any pictures of fully developed blossoms and seed pod formation in my photo archives.  Instead, I made a promise to myself that I’d attempt to locate and photograph and then share these beautiful flowers and the resulting seedpods at all stages of their development this summer.

One of my favorite details of the massive, heavenly-scented blooms of the Southern Magnolia is the “matchsticks” that form and fall off into the still-cupped tepals* just as the seeds are forming.

These matchsticks are actually the stamens, which have done their job at this point.  Since I engage in a lot of stamen love around here, y’all might notice that these are pretty tough, as stamens go.  But then, this was a necessary adaptation for a tree which evolved in a time before bees.  Each of these thick stamens was designed to withstand the attentions of the only pollinators yet in the game back then:  beetles.

Aren’t they charming, spilling out into the tepals*?

Matchsticks are the perfect image for today’s post, I thought, because a year ago yesterday I lit and smoked my last cigarette.

Yes, this is my one-year anniversary of being a non-addict.  It feels pretty great to even type that sentence — and even better to breathe deeply through my much cleaner lungs now.

Quitting smoking is really tough, and my heart goes out to all those struggling to overcome any addiction right now.  People who have never been addicted to anything really can’t “get” what it’s like, I’ve discovered.  My still-smoking friends were hardly a safe source of support in those first few weeks and months,** and my friends who’d never been addicted at all had limited capacity for understanding and empathy.

Part of the reason I ended up starting a blog (okay, two blogs) in mid-August was the feeling that I was going to lose my mind in the first few weeks without nicotine.  The gum made my throat so sore I was in danger of losing my voice, and the patches hurt my skin, so it ended up being a cold-turkey event for me.

If you’re interested in vintage Meredith posts about my journey getting the tobacco monkey off my back, you may click this link which will take you to a list of posts in the Overcoming Addiction category on my first blog.  There are only seven posts in total.  Mostly, I didn’t feel like talking about it much as it was happening.

And now that it’s finished, do I feel like talking about it?

Magnolia grandiflora immature seedpod.

Hmmm… not much.

Do I think it was worth it, a year down the road?  Definitely.  If I had to start the process all over again today, I’d do it, without hesitation.

Being free is precious.

Namasté, y’all.

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*What are tepals, you ask?  This post answers that question.

** Yes, I fell off the wagon during a girls’ weekend in the mountains in November, four months into the journey.  The temptation is still palpable even months later, even if your friends are super careful and don’t mean any harm by it and you’re sure you’re tough enough to withstand anything by then.  And it has definitely been a challenge to me that F., after 7 weeks of our quitting journey, began to smoke again.  But turn about is fair play:  when we first met, he’d been tobacco-free for eight months, and unfortunately his new smoker girlfriend dragged him off the wagon quicker than you can say “kiss an ashtray.”

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I’ve been spending a lot of time with seeds the last few days, and they never cease to amaze and move me.  Brand new beings will spring from them, without any more effort on my part than burying them properly, in a spot with access to fresh air, and water, and light.

Last night, as I planted out yet more seeds for the flats that will sit on the corner of the kitchen table (the lettuces having finally all been moved outdoors), I became engrossed in their differing textures, sizes, colors, and shapes.  It’s easy to become as enraptured and fascinated as any child if you meditate on seeds for just a few minutes, really.

Of course, you could plant them and never ponder the miracle at all.  If you were in a hurry, you might never think twice.  If your community were facing starvation, your anxiety for a nourishing result could crush any chance for awareness of a mystical connection.  If you were greedy, you might see the seeds as merely a means to a profitable end — and complain about the steep increase in price since the last season’s purchase.

Clockwise from the biggest seed at the bottom of the circle, the seeds of:  lima bean, lovage, lettuce, cardinal climber, spinach, mustard, Swiss chard, marigold, globe amaranth, dill, four o’clock, eggplant, snap pea, spider flower, nasturtium, and tomato.  At the center is my living family heirloom, a half-runner bean seed.

Personally, I think my culture could use a lot more of us meditating on seeds.  Maybe then we would make more sane choices collectively for the long term, thinking not so much about the next tax period, or election, or when we get to retire, if ever, but instead about our grandchildren, or what happens a hundred years from now, or in a hundred generations.

Seeds, although many of their cycles are quite short, may help us take the long view, perceive the actual circle of life — and not a romanticized or culturally-programmed version of it.  Often, there is quite a difference between the two.

My own culture typically views seeds as a “resource” to be used and manipulated at will, and many times reduces the seeds and their fruits to products, things, or worse, numbers on a balance sheet.  It is easy to see how we got ourselves into the mess we are in now, facing a shortage of crucial energy resources, with severely depleted topsoil, contaminated water and air, beaches awash with plastic and oceans pockmarked with enormous dead zones.  This culture, which is unfortunately globally dominant now, could not manage to treat even the most obvious foundations of life with respect.

Under the influence of this kind of reductionist thinking, we cannot perceive ourselves as part of the circle, nor our proper place within it.  Such a worldview allows the human being to assume an elevated status (the mighty, entitled Exploiter), while simultaneously degrading most human beings to mere units of monetary value (widget producer or widget consumer).  It is convenient, though, if you’d like to forget any moral or ethical duty to your fellows on the way to your end goal.

From within an egoic frame of reference, it’s nearly impossible to recognize that without the work of the seeds, insignificant if one considers their size alone, we would not survive; that because we lack the ability to transform sunlight into a food source we can assimilate, we are, by any scientific definition, a kind of parasite, and unfortunately one that is currently engaged in killing its host.

Life and death, beauty and disfigurement, compassion and cruelty, wisdom and ignorance, the sublime heights and the depths of darkest despair.  It’s all there if you look deeply enough.

Maybe I see too much in a seed.

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Sometimes I feel a wee bit jealous of those bloggers now posting photos of gorgeous snow-covered landscapes.  The Carolina winter so far is mostly grey, brown, and rust-colored as far as the eye can see, and it seems especially monotonous when I live and work in the same spot, in a hollow in the forest, so that my view from nearly every window is of the thick carpet of dead leaves, now drained of all their bright hues and decomposing beneath the pitiless, cold sky.

Yet when I take the time to do more than glance, whenever I go out into that landscape and experience it not as the wallpaper in front of which my day-to-day takes place, but as a living, breathing reality, oh so three-dimensional and lit up from within with the Mystery, well, then I don’t long for the picturesque views.  They come to greet me enthusiastically, always ready to unfold and wow me, or at the very least give me a mischievous flash of the new beauties of this season, just like the one before and the one before that.

These beauties may be more subtle.  But it may also be easier to ignore them because we’re not really trained to see them.

Starting in childhood, when we explore the seasons, those of us who hardly ever see snow in our bioregions still make paper cut-outs of snowflakes and learn about winter as the season of snow.  When I was 8, for instance, my drawing of a snowfall in a pine forest was featured on television for about 30 seconds by our local weatherman, Guy Sharpe, who made it a habit to display children’s seasonal masterpieces.

Here’s the catch:  I don’t think I’d ever seen a snowfall during the day at that age.  I had only the vaguest idea that snow was wet (and it upset me once I figured it out).  One winter when I was five, the neighborhood kids had managed to make a snowman because all of our fathers dragged wheelbarrows of the stuff over to a centrally-located yard (lucky Jennifer!) and somehow collected enough to manage it.

Well, he would still have been a dwarf if he came to life, and no one had a silk top hat with a lingering trace of magic or spare pieces of coal handy to finish off his look.  Hardly Frosty material, and sadly he melted by 5:00 p.m.

I wish someone would create some children’s stories and popular myths for Southern children, so that we’d see the glories of our own landscape in this dormant season.  There is so much to see:  the myriad dark greens and the golden lights, the beiges that read like soft highlights atop the red clay, the raspberry and plum and strawberry colors of the pansies that nearly make one’s mouth water, the grey-green lichen whose rounded petal-shaped forward edges advance steadily over the black bark, the deepening shadows that make every familiar angle a new discovery, and even the “bare” forest floor, a variegated carpet of browns rising up to meet the glowing blue at the horizon.

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“A person who sows the seed of kindness enjoys a perpetual harvest.”

(Author unknown)

“Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”

– Robert Schuller

This rather nondescript seedpod is the result of one of these blossoms and may contain who knows how many dozens of blossoms within it — if each of its five seeds is planted and cared for properly next season perhaps hundreds — and if all of those blossoms are allowed to set seed and all of those seeds planted… my, what a hummingbird feast that will be!  Can you imagine it?  The fields of darling red trumpets lifted up to the blue sky and all of those flashing iridescent wings in the sun, zooming noises as they zip here and there and chase one another, sometimes punctuating their pursuit with the most darling squeaks of fury as if to say “And stay out!”

There could be, over the course of many years, literally hundreds of thousands of blossoms dormant within this single seedpod.

A little while ago Christina over at Soul Aperture offered her readers the chance to participate in a pay-it-forward challenge begun by a friend of hers.  The prize?  A snail mail packet full of love and goodies from Christina, herself — and a chance to send more kindness out into the world!

I squealed with delight when I won, and F. said, “Let me get this straight.  You get one gift and give away five more?”  I just smiled at him and gave him a big hug and said, “But it makes me happy,” which seemed to be answer enough for him at the time.  A large part of my joy, of course, was that the package was coming straight from Christina, whom I so admire for her beautiful words and gentle, soulful approach to life, not to mention the lovely images she shares on her blog.

But a lot of the excitement came from the idea of the pay-it-forward idea.  I so like the idea of a single act spreading love and kindness well beyond its own boundaries.  It reminds me of what a seed does.

The package came yesterday, a truly unexpected surprise that Paul, our mailman, delivered with a curious glance, hoping, I suppose, that I’d open it on the porch.  (That job must be so frustrating to one’s natural curiosity.)  It was filled with fabric and apple pie spice, a recipe on a beribboned card, sweet stationery, and one of Christina’s own prints (thrill!), and it honestly felt like a ray of sunshine and a soul-hug had tumbled out of the box.  (Want to see it?  Check out the other blog post.  I try to keep the photos on this one garden-centered.)

So now I’m offering all of my readers on both blogs the chance to participate, too.  If you want to receive a surprise in your mailbox from me, and the opportunity to pass on the loving kindness until the ripples of your act end up who knows where, warming someone’s heart, putting a smile on her face, then just leave a note in the comments section of this post saying as much.

I’ll choose five recipients from all of the commenters on both blog entries.  And yes, this means you can double your chances by leaving a comment on both.  If I don’t get five comments total, I’ll send the love to other friends.  I’ve already been having such fun planning what I could send, ever since I found out I’d been selected, and I’ve got some pretty good ideas by now.

Oh, and by the way, there is no pressure here.  The gifts may be small, and sent on with no hurry.  Any pressure or deadlines would ruin the whole idea, which is that we send our acts of kindness into the world with love….

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Actually, I’d rather not.  It’s such a nice day, and I’m enjoying the birdsong and the chants of the cicadas.  Who knows how long that’ll last?  They seem to be singing their memento-mori music extra beautifully today.  Maybe they are inspired to show off now that every soul can feel summer is fleeting.  Let’s not cover nature’s sweet symphony up with noise, even to announce something as earth-shattering as the winners of my contest.

Who are… Judi and Fig.

Yes, after much consideration, I’ve decided on two winners. Judi thought perhaps the texture of sage leaves resembled brain matter, using the definition of sage as “smart.”  And Fig saw a tongue in the shape of the foliage, as in “sage advice.”  I could see where both of you were coming from, although that was not my own guess.

When I had my “ah-ha” moment in the garden, I was viewing the leaves very closely and rubbing them softly between my fingers.  (Sage is a tactile pleasure plant, for those of you who plan your gardens with all five senses in mind.)  Skin, I thought.  The drying leaves, like those shown above, even feel a bit like the slightly papery, yet meltingly soft texture human skin can assume with great age.  I looked more closely still and saw — wrinkles.

To me, a sage is someone who is wise and calm and has attained those qualities through long experience.  An elder, if you will.

(Keep in mind I was going from the English word “sage,” and not the Latin nomenclature of the plant, salvia.)

And when I went a little further in my research, to the word origin (because I am nuts and love words), I found this etymology:   the English “sage” comes from the Old French sage (11th century), which came from the Gallo-Roman sabius, itself from the Vulgar (i.e. common, everyday) Latin sapius, a corruption of the Latin sapere, meaning “have a taste, have good taste, be wise,” which originally came from the Proto-Indo-European base sap “to taste.”

So I think a “sage” might be someone who has tasted life.  Perhaps that’s not always an elder — but the wrinkles might be a clue.  I’m trying to be that kind of person myself, the only way I know how, by tasting this moment, savoring it, living it fully.  Maybe one day I’ll have tasted enough to develop deep and abiding wisdom.  Only one way to find out….

Of course, this could all be nonsense.  I’m just guessing.  And I appreciate all of you who played along at my guessing game with me.  I like to have company in my whimsy.

To the winners, congratulations to both of you!  I’ll be e-mailing you a list of choices right after I return from the Labor Day holiday.  Feel free to make requests up front for any seeds that are particularly dear to your heart.  We’ll work out all of the other details soon.  The bottom line is, you win!  You won!  Yay!

(Dried herbs and spices seems to be a bit of theme for me today.)

(Thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary.  Douglas Harper, I’m grateful to you.  I’d been bothered by the lack of an online English etymological source, as well.  I’m so glad you decided to start one.)

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For some reason the buds of the orange cosmos make me think of a circus tent.  I love the burgundy and chartreuse stripes, and that’s normally not a color combination I would be into.  (Well, come to think of it, one year I did do a “dollar store” Christmas tree using only those colors plus bright, glittery gold, and I got lots of compliments.)

Can you imagine that turns into this, though?

It’s rather encouraging.  No matter what state my life is in now, whether I’m satisfied with my level of development (and I’m generally not) in different areas of my life pie — spiritual, physical, adventure — there’s no telling what it’ll look like in the next few months.  Or years.  Every stage is so different.

Just three seasons ago, I was in a different city, with different housemates, just barely aware of a life-changing event on the horizon.

Looking back three years ago, I’m awed by how much I’ve grown and changed, and also a little proud of that woman for holding steady and keeping the faith.  I feel grateful, humble, blessed.

I want to keep growing and evolving like that.

How about you?  Take a peek back to three seasons ago and three years ago in your life.  Can you see areas of your person that were still tightly furled in a bud, that have now unfolded?

Of course, to complete the metaphor, I’ll need to post a photo of some cosmos seeds.  Luckily, I’ve got some for later.  I planted every single seed I bought, but these plants are prolific producers of very distinctive (read:  weird) seeds.  You’ll see.  Perhaps winter, when we’re all feeling more dormant and contemplative.  Then we can all look way back.

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