March 20, 2025

I Don’t Believe in Seeds

I don’t believe in seeds. I just can’t fathom the fact of what happens when you plant them, no matter how many times I’ve watched the miracle happen, which it always does, and it’s still never not blown my mind. That new life is possible*, how this can turn into that, the ordinary miracle. I still don’t believe it, I can’t. I mean, not so much that I don’t sow seeds every single spring, because I do, the most hopeful gesture I ever enact. I remember how counter-intuitive it felt to sow seeds in the darkness of March and April 2020, how beside-the-point, and even pointless, but I did it anyway, which felt daring and subversive in the depths of my anxiety, to imagine such a thing as a future. I like the hope and the promise therein, but I still don’t believe it, I never do.

Which means that when I do plant seeds, I go overboard. What are the odds, I consider, that a single seed is ever going to sprout? It’s a gamble, so I might as well sow five of them, maybe ten. What kind of magic is this, from a fairy tale, it seems like, spinning straw into gold, growing a single speck into a snapdragon, a gangling plant whose blooms I’ll be clipping until into November. To sow seeds is to take the long view, to have vision, to have faith, except I don’t, as we’ve established. Not really. Not enough that I can simply trust, instead hedging my bets, an entire handful of snapdragon seeds flung into the soil, because what if I was measured about it and then nothing happened?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about faith, about notions of A faith, and about how useful and comforting it would be to have such a thing at this moment. To have a sense of the world and in justice and progress that had not completely been turned upside down and inside out, leaving me wondering if I really know the world at all, what I ever knew about people, and progress, and what the project of these lives we’re weaving together. I watch the world through my news feeds with terror and dread, so much grief and sadness, and I long for something firm to hold onto. I want to keep believing in people, and possibility, in this beautiful world and for our little place in it, and good things being possible.

But I guess that’s what faith is, when it’s hard to believe, but you do it anyway. When we sow those seeds, even when it seems impossible that they’ll ever turn into anything. And what if any doubt we have is a reason to chuck in a handful of seeds, instead of permission to give up sowing altogether?What if sowing seeds shows us that miracles happen all the time?

I woke up this morning, the first day of spring, to find that the seeds I’d planted on Sunday evening had already begun. After a beautiful morning singing songs of peace and joy, I came home and dove into edits on my fourth novel, which will be coming your way in a year less three days.**

I still don’t believe in seeds, and yet. Here we are.

*Not unrelated: I also can’t believe that my children exist. Like, what even is up with that? Where did they come from and how do they just keep getting more and more magnificent all the time?

**Which is exactly five years TO THE DAY after I first wrote about the project: “Making: A new novel that’s inspired by Barbara Pym’s books, and I just hit 10,000 words. It might not be good, it might never be published, but my goodness, am I having a good time.”