Seeds of Abundance

for Autumn Equinox 2009

It was one of those brilliant autumn in days North Texas. The strident summer Sun had mellowed to just the right brightness, yet it was still t-shirt weather warm. The August doldrums had moved off and there was a breeze again. My husband Scooter and I were driving down country roads looking at rural land. Clean green air streamed through the open windows of the car.

Pleasant enough, but even so it was just one cattle farm after another, enlivened only by the dark wash of trees along the creeks and gullies. The constant grazing of cows had tamped down the grasses into obedient shortness, a palatable sameness. The fields were forever juvenile, the grasses never allowed to seed, without potential, without hope, thwarted lives kept in constraint.

REBIRTH

Then we came around a bend to see the sharp vertical plumes of a native prairie grass, brushy bluestem, the rust-colored filaments shining gold in the sunset glow. We had to pull over and stare. Decades ago the landowner planted Bermuda, a tropical grass, on top of the native prairie. The aggressive grass dominated the land, making a monoculture that was good for cows and bad for everything else.

Then the owner went away, and the animals, too. Neglect was all nature needed. The native seeds still remembered, even though it had been 50 years, and the bullish brushy bluestem is always one of the first. Seeds are the memory of plants. From the dark silent rest in the dank soil, bluestem seeds still yearned for their original prairie days, struggling to the surface to pierce the Bermuda and find the light.

We fell in love with the land that day and convinced the absentee landowner to sell. We stripped off the Bermuda cover and replaced it with native grasses and wildflowers. Compared to the surrounding lands, it’s a riot of waist high strappy leaves and fall seed flumes that strive even higher, and rowdy with a variety of life -– birds, butterflies and a myriad of unseen rodents and rabbits. Yet even today, it’s adorned with the yellow autumn blooms of goldenrod, a forb we did not plant, whose seeds languished in the soil until they remembered, too.

SUNLIGHT MADE TANGIBLE

On this planet life is dependent on plants. The greenery here creates most of the air, much of the soil, and anchors the entire food chain. Compared to the huge biomass and energy value of plants, we animals are stowaways. We live on a plant-et. Everywhere but the desert and arctic, plants are busily, rampantly, enthusiastically and luxuriantly procreating. Their sole purpose is to transform the Sun’s endless energy through photosynthesis so that they can grow, mature and cast seeds to the winds.

Seeds. If you went outside and dug up a square inch of soil, put it in a sheltered place and gave it light and moisture, it would sprout from seeds contained in the soil. If you cut down those tiny plants, seeds would sprout again, and again, over and over for 60 years. Only after many decades would the bank of seeds held in that small square of soil be exhausted.

Now that’s abundance. Plants make far more seeds, and berries and fruits, than they need to reproduce, more than the birds and bugs and animals could ever eat. Plants make seeds for the life of it, because reckless fertility is what they do. They concentrate the energy of sunlight and make it tangible in seeds, giving totally without thinking of reward, without possession or attachment to outcome. Plants live to give and give to live. The lesson of plants is clear: creative fertility is the overriding principle of this planet.

MATH, BIOLOGY & SUN

Consider the sunflower, its radiant yellow petals framing a center packed tight with the familiar grey seed. The seeds swirl out in a parabolic spiral, Fermat's spiral. The spiral’s dimensions reflect the Fibonacci numbers sequence, the basis of the golden ratio, a formula of height to depth and width that underlies much of classical painting, sculpture and architecture. Math and light, beauty and biology, all simply to make a seed.

Every seed is both a completion and a beginning. The grasses in my meadow pause at the climax of their process, seed plumes flush in the autumn sun, shining in potential, radiant in maturity, proclaiming a life well lived. Then they release their seeds into the wind, water and soil, confident that whatever may come, however many years may pass, they too will rise to remember the Sun once more.

The Balance Before the Fall

So, this is the beginning of fall, Autumn Equinox, the official first day. Fall in Texas is different: we don’t have one. In other parts of the country, golden sunlight casts its fading warmth on the red and yellow oaks of autumn, lakes are adorned with bobbing flotillas of migrating fowl. Tractors cut vast fields of hay, farmers plow harvest stubble to fallow until the spring.

We define fall in a different way. It’s when the evening lows are no longer in the 80s. Rain changes from the mad thrashing thunderstorms of summer – that is, if we get rain in the summer — to the enveloping downpour that comes with cold fronts from the north. We tentatively emerge from our air-conditioned dens to see the sky, once a pale bleached blue, regain its deeper hue. Lawns come to life, changing to emerald green from parchment brown.

We slip into the leeward side of the seasons as the autumnal equinox arrives. Leaving the suspended state of summer, with its forever young feeling of long days, sunshine and growth, we rejoin the awesome river of change that is life. Fall is about falling, about tumbling from the high point of summer, returning to the flow, about releasing and letting go. It’s about believing that the way to leave a mark on this life is not through accumulating and controlling, to own or to possess, but through creating and releasing, from the children we raise to the works of art we create.

For us, this giving without obligation is a philosophy we come to after much consideration and beating up on our egos. To the natural world of plants and animals, bugs and fish, it is simply the way of life. Leaves separate from the trees, cascade to the ground and return into the Earth. Animals die and decay, their bodies fertilize plants that feed their children. Everything returns to the source, knowing it will return. The circle of life, the cycles of life. Regeneration through generations.

Autumn Equinox is the moment of equilibrium just before this fall. The Earth in its wobbly path through the cosmos is for a brief time spinning perfectly upright and the Sun is shining straight on at the equator—hence the name, equinox. Instead of leaning into the Sun like it does in summer or leaning away in winter, just a for a moment the Earth is balanced -- no, not so much that an egg placed on its pointed end will stand upright, like a lot of folks try to do on this day -- but enough to give us a metaphor to live by.

This momentary drift into balance and back out again is a reminder of how tentative life can be, how fleeting and how sweet. It reminds us to seize those moments, carpe diem, and live them fully, to embrace this life and all its mortality, to never go to bed angry at someone you care about. So we take this special day before we tip towards winter and the waning days of the seasonal year to celebrate the connections we make in this brief time together and honor the abundant gifts the Earth gives to us so willingly.