Nature Reveals God’s Nature
By Kolya Braun-Greiner
Milkweed flowers, 2019. Photo by Kolya Braun-Greiner
A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait for at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait for a hundred years with no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed…. A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three- hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. When you go into a forest…. you probably don’t look down, where just beneath your single footprint sit hundreds of seeds, each one alive and waiting…. When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least 100 more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.
Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
I call this a gift of abundant waiting. Like seeds, are we alive while we wait? What is our Creator’s intent for our growth? This kind of pregnant waiting is not doing nothing. It’s ready, and it’s poised for growth, designed perfectly for traveling and spreading: carried by wind, or fur, or digestion and excretion by animals. They wait for just the conditions to be ripe for their growth.
Hope Jahren goes on to describe the length to which some seeds will wait for these conditions. Scientists found a lotus seed buried in a bog in China. When they scratched its hull and provided water, it began to grow. The carbon dating of the hull revealed that this Lotus seed had been waiting 2,000 years to sprout.
Milkweed seeds at Dayspring, 11/30/18
When my pollinator garden “went to seed” and everything looked dead I discovered that it continued to foster life. To my joy the goldfinches arrived to feast upon the coneflower (Echinacea) when it became a crispy brown crown of seeds. So too I witness the yellow blanketed fields of goldenrod in September turning a frosty brown. I pull one tiny cluster from a now dead flower head, and count the seeds: 20 of them, each with their own little feathered wings, waiting for the winter winds to carry them, seeding a field of the future. How is this like eternal life?
Each of us is like a seed, full of possibilities not immediately apparent, not yet visible. What we don’t expect may surprise us. As Hope Jahren says: “Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.” Faith, merely the size of a mustard seed, is an abundant active waiting for the seeming impossible and inevitable.
What conditions do you need for growth? What’s inside your seed? What seeds of possibility await growth in the future? Within you or in the world?
Excerpted from Kolya’s forthcoming book, Nature Reveals God’s Nature: Attending and Tending Creation. Photos by Kolya Braun-Greiner.
Today is the feast day of St. Ambrose, patron saint of bees, beekeepers, candles, and wisdom.
