Upon encountering seed ...

Have you ever been tugged at or called and yet when you look around , you only see a patch of grass and a few flowers? 

There was a time in my life where I may have noticed the tug but shrugged it off and kept on walking on my path as though it hadn't occurred.  

It's not the case any more ... these days I pay more attention aware of the greater invitation that I have expressed to be in a greater communion with Nature is one of those requests that opens up a myriad of wonders in my world personal and in my world global... 
It is not lost on me that an invitation to be in greater communion with Nature has opened up the essential doorway to coming to know the Nature of Me, or to put it more simply ... coming to know my own nature.

The desire to have a greater connection to the world around me and that runs through me and makes up the body that has my identity has brought me time and again to the plant kingdom and the elemental forces of  Earth that express themselves in a play of constancy of light and not so light and continues to open the perceptual gates of my awareness that we are in this together!  

So here again, back to that tug, that sense of having been called ...

Could it be coming from another sentient being?  A plant?  A tree?  Dare I say it...  a stone?

Could it be a response to a question or an invitation you yourself have asked or offered...? 
A response from a greater field of consciousness ... often unseen , tricky to name but undeniably sensible and sensed energies? 
​

 I was on a medicine walk ...

  ... a personal encounter with Nature where I am alive with an invitation         carrying lightly a living question that I hand over to the walk…allowing myself   to be walked and engaged with…

 It really means that I am entering into a field that I acknowledge the     presence of other contributing beings ...

 with a heightened sense of aliveness and engagement and yet so natural that     there is no effort or trying involved.
 A space where I come to know my own Nature a little more as I get to               encounter and engage with that of other ...  

​
  I felt the energetic tug of a patch of wild flowers and grasses that I had just walked    past lightly enough that I didn't fall over and strongly enough that I knew to     respond… ​

---

   
So to lower level of gaze I knelt down and took in the sea of colour, of greens of yellows of browns and silvers beings dancing in the light of warmth and the sun shone upon us all…
"Hello" says me, to all I see, a smile lighting my face and I softly speak to all that are now within my gaze as it widens to include more than the plants themselves …

Glasses on and I take a closer look into the field of plenty that is gazing back at me …

This medicine  walk is largely an invitation to be shown the nature of seed…

“Seed – will you show me more of ye, please?”

Now to the eyes of a mower of lawns or even a photographer this encounter would have either been mown or walked past. Had I chosen that it would have undoubtedly been a moment missed, for what opened up there is still with me, changing me, working through my body in ways unfamiliar and my thinking being freed and shaped by new forces…

To the eye all beauty shines through colour and form, shape and movement and all who were gathered here had a quota of those qualities ….

Seeds of grasses, wild buttercups, sorrels red and other, docks and plantains and many that are unnamed as yet …
a wonderfully wild patch of verdant plant life that was attracting many different small flying ones – big orange back/bottomed bumble, small hoverflies, again, un-named by me but not un-noticed … wonder full meetings were  happening everywhere. In that space I was face to face with my first ever plant spirit journey of more than twenty years previous - a timeless moment that was immediately upon me as though it were yesterday.

 ... a personal meeting with ranunculi  where I formally introduced myself and sat, drawing her and shyly whispering some of the reason for my being there with this familiar but never before truly met joy bringer .... yellows, openings and a plentitude of smiles in that particular Somerset field so long ago! I also recall the red sorrel on that occasion as a neighbour and ally to the dizzying joys of the waxy soft petals of the smiling buttercups… And here I was again with the same two asking them to show me their seed, what they know of seed,

what they contain of seed …

and of course seed was in everything!!!

​And then another rare joy … I looked down as my kneel was tiring from the position and I greet a different being altogether …. leaving a silvery slippery viscous trail in its path there I gaze upon a rather large brown slug with a fine orange trim heading towards its counterpart, my boot.


In this atmosphere I had no hesitation in simply staying still and allowing the meeting to go about its own course for a short while. Where I am usually not so agreeable to this particular species it was really sweet to note that it seemed so natural to let slug to do its trailmaking way towards me … or should I say, to my boot. . .
​We were all just doing the same thing ... coming together a little. 

o what happened there in this soft warm place of greeting and meeting these plant beings?

Wonder. Curiosity. Joy fullness. Gratitude. Warmth. Friendliness to passers by and a little writing and reporting Presence with other seed bearers at different stages in their cycle of life … 

The last season’s tall seed head of the dark brown dock or rumex was a fabulous contrast in a scape of youthful and exuberant energies. Standing as one of the taller stalks and full of seeds as yet ungifted, unreleased and by no means fully spent …

Inviting a good wind and honouring its own timing was all that was asked of me in this moment  for in this dock seed, stalk and pods, that I now know to have been rumex patienta, I meet an all present  aspect of myself …

It was only today, nearly 24 hours later than the meeting itself that I come closer to the encounter and at a different level. As I sorted through the photographs and reconnected to the energies and the different encounters of this stage of the walk I was also reconnecting to their gifts, their qualities ... and something  occurred that shifted my perceptual reality beyond what it had been in the seconds previous ...  

    And then began a vast, expanse of consciousness encounter such that my perception was altering about everything …. Not only  through the many seeding plants and other winged and crawling beings that I made contact with the day before but through the response made via the question I had put out to the wider whole … as though I have been given a direct encounter with the devic intelligence of what seed is …

I am shifted to a different consciousness, somehow aware that it was occurring and observing a rearrangement of the way my journeying with yesterday's walk was occurring ...I 'leave activities' for some time and am taken to some edges ... I recall speaking to myself at one point, reassuring in tone to stay with it ... we are being gifted something of seed ... and it was a stretch for me to stay with it ... in fact stretch is what was required as I was somehow being pushed to see my limits, where I meet the outer walls and surfaces ... as though my inner soft tissues and fluids of the head were pulsing rapidly and pushing blood flow towards an expansion I wasn't able to stay with ... I drew gently back from the pressure and after transitioning to a quieter and more easeful pace had a clear insight ...  

​     
​     I am a seeded being …

     I carry within me and as me

     seeds of awakened consciousness –

     not static as in a noun

     but as a verb-al,

     a living expression of infinite stranded light signatures         of energy …

 
     I Am a Seeded Being …
     
     

---

​I feel blessed for the bounty of beauty and delivery from seed in ways for which words are yet to emerge  . . tinkering with that tender and still morphing space would be counter to the gift being offered. 

I was shown where the outer edges are and how they can either stop me from movement, from growth or support me …

I was shown the wonders of allowing chaos to be an energy that is essential and though strange and really unfamiliar to my current disposition, I know how to meet it and have it move me ...  To not allow this wonder of creation, primary life force to be given space would be to commit  further disconnection from seeded or innate Potency and Knowing ...

I am  re-minded of Wendell Berry's Manifesto:The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front and as I read it through once again I realise that I have never really been able to receive the gift of this poet before so fully as I can this day.

The gift of a farmer ... one who has cultivated a shared breath with and from living close to land, to soil, to seed ...

Tears begin to rise in my eyes and I become watery all over ... a washing of surface level only so far ...some topsoil being loosened enough to open ground a little and scatter some new old technology energies that may send out roots and bring forth shoots to nourish and generate more.

Being unwilling to be ‘out of control’, unwilling to really do or be something that does not compute, being measured in action that requires courage,  the courage that is willing to be and live undefined by outside forces... all of this was delivered to me in these hours with the vast and complex simple being of Seed.

Seed is a new ally and has me shaking a little with it’s tiny physical representation and vast cornucopic array of movement and shifting of me … ​​

I am changed … am still changing…
and inviting the encounter and the ally to stay with me and bring towards me the catalysing and activating energies that would serve to ignite our greatest seed potentials …

​Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
 
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
 
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.