Gone to Seed

'Gone to seed'
"a phrase that carries negative connotations. What seeds really carry are a promise."

I came upon an instagram post a few days ago that made me laugh out loud and prompted me to borrow both the quote and the photo (thank you for both, Emily Zollo!)

I've had a week  plus of feeling myself going to seed. The very phrase popped into my head more than once. A medley of oddball health hiccups—a bad reaction to a shingles vaccine, a very bad cold, an anaphylactic reaction to hazelnuts—left me dwelling on the feeling that my health was eroding and dropping like so many crumbly leaves.

But bear with me a bit. Emily mentioned "promise" and what is a seed if not a promise of future vitality and renewal?  When it "goes to seed" a plant has stopped the productive growth stage, and is turning to the production of seeds—the plant is focused upon propagation of the species; it is a normal and necessary part of a plant's life cycle to produce seeds once the plant's harvestable days are over.

The analogy may not hold up, but let's deconstruct this a bit. In the aftermath of my own challenging week, I crawled back into my yoga practice with a sense of achey renewal, and I like to think the "renewal" aspect of practicing after sickness, the pace, the focus, helped my students. (I could be deluding myself.) I felt we were all of us together more focused in on our individual cycles of both dissolution and letting go, as well as regenerative growth.

"Gone to seed" implies "Past his/her prime" or "not full of life"  but I would say at this stage of the game, 55+ my prana is abundant  and more nuanced and varied than when I was 20. While I don't have the stamina I had at 20, nor the desire to push past what actually feels good and fairly natural in my own body, my sense of "waking up" on the physical, neurological even cellular level feels like a much finer sensory experience than ever before. Injury has made me pay attention. The resulting humility has helped me sidestep the tendency to get trapped in ego. My "seeds" such as they are, as I hover at latter middle age—full of life still but no longer capable of creating it—are what I give of myself as a yoga teacher, in my family, and in my friendships. And that to me feels, on a good day, less like the brittle breaking brown of fallen leaves, and more like contribution to a rich, loamy soil.

Here we are in the midst of this dazzling display of Fall color. Seeds have dropped and leaves are preparing to. Life and death are doing their colorful, saucy dance in everything we see around us. Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also. But, A garden gone to seed is a diverse ecosystem.

From Thoreau: "In Wildness is the preservation of the world."

This is the way of it, as nature shows us. The falling apart, disintegration, dissolution of what we feel to be permanent, lasting, unshakeable. The promise is that the beautiful decay makes it possible for life to pick up again come spring and nature to keep on keeping on. 

With nature's glorious autumn die-off, and flowers casting forth their seeds before succumbing to fruitful rot, I return to my own fading (thankfully) unwellness, and feel my own seeds of vitality and renewal. For sure, I am going to seed.

Join me?
Love,
Leslie