what the dark can teach us

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark,
the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.
— mark nepo

I am attentive to the seeds in my garden. Drawn to them. Searching for them. Collecting them. Scattering them where I hope they might take root next spring.

The pointy orange sulphur cosmos seeds slowly burst, stretching fully until their connection to the stem lessens enough for the wind to carry them away. My seed gathering moves this time frame along a bit. I place my cupped hand beneath their starburst and gently pull, letting the slender spikes gather like tiny darts in my palm.

Butterfly weed takes care of itself. Its pods split open and release silken parachutes to the wind. My native rose mallow leaves behind dry pods that rattle softly when I shake them. When I crack them open, perfect round seeds line up inside — small, dark promises of plate sized white hibiscus flowers.

I sort through the debris, feeling for what is real — the weight, the density, the small hardness that says this one holds life. Sometimes I save them for neighbors, tucking them into little envelopes. Sometimes I pour them into my dad’s old blue graniteware berry bucket. Sometimes I just let them fall from my hands.

So many seeds.

The abundance is humbling.

buried seeds
crack open in the dark,
the instant
they surrender
to a process
they can’t see.

mark nepo

The scientific process of cold stratification is that surrender. The seed must endure the season of cold and wetness. Its outer shell, a hard protective coating, slowly softening through the alternating rhythms of frost and thaw, moisture and dryness. This process creates small places of weakening, where the shell will eventually crack so the inner life can begin its slow journey toward the light.

The darkness is not punishment. It is preparation.

When the outer world feels inhospitable to growth, beauty, or aliveness, something beneath the surface is at work. It is not the end of growth, but its beginning. A hidden cultivation of potential - shoots and roots are already growing within that darkness.

Perhaps this is the metaphor we need now. It is the one I need as we live in this brutal winter of our collective soul. A season that is rife with incomprehensible cruelty, intentional lies, deep division, and the stunning vulnerability of long-held governmental norms and traditions.

Can we risk trusting that beneath the coldness, something new and alive is taking shape?

Can we let our experience of living the seasons, live in us now?

This long dark is softening us, cracking what has been sealed too tightly -
our illusions of control, our comfort in distance, our numbness to one another’s pain. The hard shell is weakening.

Nepo continues, "In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which is ultimately an awakening beyond all imagining. As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as a coneflower or a cosmos, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way."

It cracks all the way.

Invitation to Slow — Reflection and Practice

Gather some seeds this week — maybe in your yard or at a local park.
Hold them in your palm. Notice their characteristics: tiny, round, smooth, rough, long, spiky, still surrounded by petals and dying flower parts, or fully released from any chaff.

CONSIDER:

• What in me is still hard, still resisting the slow work of change?
• Where is life asking me to soften — not to give up, but to give over to what I cannot yet see?
• Does this seed invite me to trust what I cannot yet know?
• How does it feel in my body to give not knowing, uncertainty, space to breathe?
• As the darkness grows this autumn, can some part of me trust, that just like the seed I hold in my hand, new life is at work in me and in our collective?

This darkness surrounding us is not empty or void of life.
It is full of beginnings we cannot yet imagine.

What feels like dormancy is preparation — the quiet work of softening and becoming ready.

The seed, held in darkness, is not lost; it is gathering strength for what comes next.

I swear I can hear Leonard Cohen singing from heaven,

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything —
That’s how the light gets in.

Perhaps the courage of the seed is this very surrender. To allow the cracking, to trust that the light enters not to end the darkness, but to continue the growing.