It’s my favorite time in the garden. Everything’s dead. The frost has put things to rest. And there, in the dry, monochromatic landscape, hidden to all but the seeing eye, is life.
For those of us who are Christians and who tend gardens, resurrection is perhaps the easiest part of the Savior story to comprehend. Out of death, life. A seed is planted, but in its due time, bursts forth with an entirely new kind of life, a new body.
The seed is dull and small and hard, and sometimes barely visible. It has no signs of life, and oftentimes falls to the cold dirt, or rides the gusty autumn winds, with virtually no fanfare. Only those who really know what’s happening can even pick it out. To most, it is completely unrecognizable, and completely unimportant.
This is the time when all of the energy of the former plant is infused in a power-packed little pellet. Everything the plant has worked for and proven rests in the hands of this tiny bit of resurrection power. All its hopes laid to rest, with only the hope of resurrection.
Then, in the spring, when the harshness of winter has torn against the barrier of the naked seed, when the piles of snow have burdened its being, and when the rains and storms of early spring have pushed it to its limit, that tiny miracle begins to show signs of life. It breaks open, and the most delicate shoot of little green life pushes with great power through the dirt. Uncanny power. Resurrection power. Something so small, so fragile, should never have the strength to do what it does. But so it does. And to those of us watching, it is jaw-dropping.
From death, life. From cold, motionless seed, breathtaking beauty; delicious food; sustenance for a microcosmic civilization; a buffet for birds and bees feeding from the river of life in its pollen, dusting the earth with the powder of potential. Life anew. A life never imagined in the mind of the seed, but gestating there all along.
So I am out in the yard, where every year I harvest a selection of seeds for my seed collection. I leave the rest to find their way to the ground, and I wait for resurrection power — the joy that is to come.
This is lovely.