Becoming Seeds-Being the Memory Keepers

Germinating wisdom in the dark unknown and a new January workshop offering.

Seeds hold the wisdom and experience of a species and all of the many ancestors who came before them. Contained in their DNA is the mystery of how to form matter into the plants they know how to be. Holding their collective experience, seeds carry the knowledge of how to respond the next time the environment gets too hot, too dry, too wet, too cold. They are the memory keepers of not only their stories, their history—they hold the dreams, the possibilities for all their future lives.

As the light retreats here in the northern hemisphere, and we tuck ourselves into our warm homes, even amidst the holiday gatherings, and especially after, can we slow down enough to feel ourselves germinating? Incubating perhaps? This is the time to nurture what wants to be born in us. In our communities. To protect and nurture our seeds until the time comes to send out roots.

What is a seed, actually? A traveling home, self-contained time capsule, waiting, living in dormancy for a temporary time without roots—a mother on the move protecting her living baby. Seeds are what make flowering plants unique. They are alive, yet in a kind of suspended animation that can be sustained for a few weeks, a season, several years, or sometimes for millennia. Each seed waits to find the right temperature, light, and amount of water. When they do, a switch turns on—something still barely understood by science—and germination begins, breaking open their seed coat.

The word angiosperm translates literally from Greek to mean "seed vessels.” In its simplest formulation, that vessel is an organism consisting of three main parts—the embryo (the fully fertilized baby); the endosperm (the fruit and food surrounding it); and the seed coat (the mother). Seeds are alive because they are already fertilized. So long as the embryo lives, they can germinate and grow. Seeds are the time-travelers that enable flowering plants to make jumps in genetic code and diversify rapidly, to leapfrog across epochs to arrive in new homes where they can root. Flowering plants learned how to travel by seed, enabling them to bring their memories—their wisdom—through a hundred million years, seed by seed, to us today.

Some seeds are only viable for two or three years, but some can live much longer. In 1983, Hiroshi Utsunomiya of Yamaguchi University discovered seeds in an ancient food storage chamber in Japan that were found to be two thousand years old. He put them in water and three months later one seed swelled and grew. After ten years it had grown to a seven-foot-tall magnolia tree and blossomed for the first time with flowers containing either seven or eight petals.  A species that had been long extinct, its closest cousins alive today only have six petals. Sometimes that call to germinate takes an exceptionally long time. What could this magnolia teach us about navigating an ever-evolving, always creating world?

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I am offering a new five-week workshop, Guidance from the Flowers: Germinating Winter Wisdom, starting Wednesday January 15th, 2025, offered from 7:30 to 9:00pm Eastern.

The flowers invite us to dream with them, entwining the seeds of their becoming with our own. Winter will be a POWERFUL time to connect with the flowers as we explore germinating together.

In this live zoom-based five-part workshop, we will connect with the ancient wisdom of the flowers by exploring our entwined evolutionary love story, learn about their radical intelligence so different from our own, and empower ourselves to use our intuition and imagination to hear their messages.

Through stories, science and shared experiences we will explore how flowers are the elders who midwifed us into this world and want to nurture us still. Together we will gently, slowly, and convincingly step into their world and begin to understand what the flowers have to share with us when we shift from talking about flowers in third person to welcoming them into our conversations as respected elders.

Learn MORE, to REGISTER, and read the FULL DETAILS of this course offering HERE.

In this course, you will:

• Gain a felt sense of the long evolutionary story of our planet and how the flowers are our elders with so much wisdom to share that is eons older than our own.

• Learn how much guidance is available to us from the flowers, and how to allow ourselves to receive it and trust it to support ourselves and our loved ones.

• Redefine plants and flowers as sentient, unpack centuries of human hubris as the only intelligent creatures and explore the possibilities that open when we see the world around us from other beings’ points of view.

• Explore how it is collaboration between all life forms, so much more than survival and competition, that drives our evolution and holds the vast webs of our ecosystems together.

• Hear about the latest science in plant intelligence in an easy, intriguing and digestible manner.

• Be given tools to explore and trust our imagination and intuition – the key methods for communicating with all the non-human world.

• Be slowly escorted through a step-by-step process to connect with the flowers and receive their wisdom, guidance and support for your everyday life.

• Deepen our awe and wonder of flowers and the natural world all around us.

• Gain a greater understanding of why reverence for our natural world is key to our future.

• And much more…

The flowers are speaking, asking us to remember and resurrect our entwined evolutionary love story.