To Sow A Seed

11      For as the soil makes the sprout come up
         and a garden causes seeds to grow,
     so the Sovereign  LORD will make righteousness
         and praise spring up before all nations.

                        Isaiah 61:11

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    Hullo again, my lovelies! 

Yup, you guessed it…. Another scribble has come, and taken over the controls very deftly indeed. It also stubbornly wanted to be about gardens, in the dead of winter. 

Here I sit shivering (well, not really :P it’s warm inside, if not out!) in temperatures that would make most folks stare goggle-eyed, and ask in faint voices whether perhaps the thermometer was malfunctioning…. And flowers sprout up in my scribbles. Highly irregular, wouldn’t you say? But one cannot overrule the ideas of scribbles, especially the ones that come with a grain of solemnity infused therein… Without you necessarily having meant them to. Forgive me if I wax a bit philosophical in with the flowers, it wanted to come out that way!

I have a feeling I may yet be continuing with the garden analogies quite a lot this year, they are popping up all over like earthworms after a rain….

In fact, a quaint little story I read once keeps coming to mind…. The story of a moonflower.

I can’t for the life of me remember the title, but I’m fairly certain it was Jan Karon who wrote it….

And it was so sweet that little-me went straight away and wrote what I thought was poetry on the subject of moonflowers that were in the habit of flooding the moonlit world with perfume.

And now I’m awfully glad to say I have no idea where that scrap of paper went, because I’m quite sure it would not sound half so much like poetry to me now as it did then X-)

Anyway. What brought on this streak of reminiscing is the moonflower, once again.

Now, I was thoroughly enamoured with the idea of them for quite a long time afterwards, and when I finally found an actual packet of moonflower seeds…. I thought I’d been handed a diamond mine. I’m quite certain I dreamed about them that night, and maybe even on successive nights. (Why no, I have never been ezackly quite normal, however did you guess??)

And upon opening that packet on planting day, I found some of the biggest seeds I’d ever seen. So big you could almost call them kernels. 

But just planting them wasn’t enough. First, the packet said, they had to be nicked. Deeply nicked. 

It was either that, or filing a small hole neatly past their defences, exposing the heart of the seed.

Now, this seemed like unnecessary cruelty to a helpless and innocent flower-that-was-not-yet to me. 

But the truth of the matter was, their outer shell was so thick, that unless it was penetrated, the water you must needs soak them in before you could plant them, took a very, very long time to get to the heart of the seed. And if it doesn’t get to the heart…. It cannot germinate, and that seed may as well be thrown away. It doesn’t have a chance.

I wonder…. How often the Gardener has to do that with us? 

Yours musingly….

-Emily

Ps. I have NO idea where that 11 snuck in, it does not even exist until I hit publish. And I tried fixing it soooo many times, but it is stubborn. So it is there still. Excuse it…..