[Propertalk] meditation on mustard seeds

[Ann Fontaine]

http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/mysticaljourney/proper6b.html


Meditation One

the journey of seeds


By contrast, the true flowering plants (angiosperm itself means  
“encased seed”) grew a seed in the heart of a flower, a seed whose  
development was initiated by a fertilizing pollen grain independent of  
outside moisture.  But the seed, unlike the developing spore, is  
already a fully equipped embryonic plantpacked in a little enclosed  
box stuffed full of nutritious food. Moreover, by featherdown  
attachments, as in dandelion or milkweed seed, it can be wafted upward  
on gusts and ride the wind for miles; or with hooks it can cling to a  
bear’s or a rabbit’s hide; or like some of the berries, it can be  
covered with a juicy, attractive fruit to lure birds, pass undigested  
through their intestinal tracts and be voided miles away.

   The ramifications of this biological invention were endless. Plants  
traveled as they had never traveled before.  They got into strange  
environments heretofore never entered by the old spore plants or still  
pine-cone-seed plants.  The well-fed, carefully cherished little  
embryos raised their heads everywhere.  Many of the older plants with  
more primitive reproductive mechanisms began to fade away under this  
unequal contest.  They contracted their range into secluded  
environments.  Some, like the giant redwoods, lingered on as relics;  
many vanished entirely.

–Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

(both Eisley quotes from “How Flowers Changed the World”)

Meditation Three
the saving of seeds

Well I started to save seeds twenty years ago when I first realized  
that corporations wanted to own and control seed and they wanted to  
create property in seed and they wanted to turn it into their  
intellectual property. …
     … For me the imperative to save seeds came from really an ethical  
urge to defend life’s evolution, life’s diversity, and the freedom of  
life to reproduce, to multiply, to be able to be distributed. Because  
I could see that this would create a new kind of scarcity and it has. …
     Today for us the work on seed has become the place from where we  
are responding to the worst tragedies and worst crises of our times.   
If we really seriously look at the crises we are facing whether it is  
climate change or unemployment or it’s the crises of food where you  
can’t be secure in your food at all, the solution to so much of this  
comes from people being on the land as conservers of the seed, of the  
soil, of the water.  –Vandana Shiva

Hear the whole interview:
  http://www.daylife.com/topic/Vandana_Shiva/quotes

The Last Word


Those who will not learn

in plenty to keep their place

must learn it by their need

when they have had their way

and the fields spurn their seed.

We have failed Thy grace.

Lord, I flinch and pray,

send Thy necessity.


-Wendell Berry

We Who Prayed and Wept

Collected Poems, 1957-1982






Ann Fontaine c3
Lander, Wyoming


4311