The seed in winter

Finding faith in the hollowness of a moment like this

I’m sharing my column for the winter issue of Arnoldia, the magazine I edit for the Arnold Arboretum. The piece feels like it wants to be flung into the wind without waiting for the issue to hit the mail in mid-December. The issue is full of good things: diversity, place, and resilience; tree care in the Anthropocene; a bee murder mystery; poetry in folio by Carson Colenbaugh; and a garland of solstice plants, among other great content. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that you can learn more about the magazine and subscribe here.

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It’s been a dappled autumn, a strange swirl of bright foliage and summer-warm days, with little of the gray-drawn drear of winter’s doorway in it. And yet, while the numbers on the weather app scramble, the sky still signals the coming winter—reliably, as Orion rears up in the evening dark, and also surprisingly, as the occasional flare of the aurora has played trickster-like across our skies. We’re in a time of disordered signs. But then, the seasons always have interwoven—there’s a bit of spring still at work in fall’s coloring leaves, as they reveal the relict pigments that had protected them when they first broke bud with the increase of light. Just as last spring, I felt autumn’s swoon as the brown-spotted blossoms flew from the magnolias, and winter under a snow of white flowers—

How long would it take
this brave breeze to bury me
in cherry petals?

More recently, on the evening of November 5, I started for home across the landscape through the season’s newfound dark—the fallback hour always a surprise, not only shifting sunrise and sunset, but altering the character of the light at every hour. An evening of unsettling warmth in that wintry light, which as I passed out of the willows and into the maples ripened and softened into a twilight of such sweetness: the moon’s fine smile fogged as if it were breathing on the dome of the sky; a west-going flash of contrail, which spread and evaporated like a ribbon of pigment draped into water. Out on the Arborway, the traffic spasmed; I could feel as much as hear the throb and tumult of the city churning around the station over the hill. I didn’t want to go down into it, and so I paused along the path where the quinces and medlars clasp their wintering fruits against the winds to come. I watched as the troughs of the clouds lifted the going blush of sun, and bats rowed out among the inky crowns of the trees, dipping for insects in eddies of air.

And now, while frost has yet to settle in the night, I see winter not only in the sky, but also in the fringes and pompoms of seeds bobbing at the meadow’s edge—the long, broken wands of goldenrod and the glassine tufts of the asters, all fringed with the seed-fluff that lofts with the winter’s early winds. I’m watching the milkweeds, too—their seed pods burst, their silken linings unraveling, like so many tiny parkas unzipped and blown open by the intrusive wind.

In his late writings, Henry David Thoreau devoted himself with passionate precision to looking at nature, and the milkweed’s habits entranced him.¹ As his illness advanced—he would die from tuberculosis in 1862, in the early darkness of the Civil War—he seemed in a panic to learn “the language of these fields” while he still was able. At the same time, he worried that “in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole.” By 1860, however, Thoreau had begun to reconcile the magnitudes of microscope and heaven’s cope. He finds the early-November goldenrods and asters “richly and exuberantly downy,” their seed “so fine that when we jar the plant and set free a thousand, it is with great difficulty that we detect them in the air.” Here at the edge of visibility, at the threshold of microscope and heaven’s cope, he begins to discover presence and possibility. The seeds of milkweed in particular give him the amplitude he is looking for, as he zooms from the minuscule scale of seed-sails to the landscape mileage the windblown seeds would clock. Thoreau notes how the milkweed’s pods crack open to reveal the seeds with their “thin, silvery parachutes like the finest unsoiled silk,” which soon detach to become “the buoyant balloon which, like some spiders’ webs, bears the seeds to new and distant fields.” To Henry, these seeds are imbued with wanderlust and ambition: a seed hangs on the lip of a recently burst pod like “a vessel moored with long cables and lying in the stream, prepared to spread her sails and depart any moment.” As he sifts the seeds from burst pods along Clematis Brook, he watches as their silk threads “fly apart at once, opening with a spring…

I let one go … I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood….. Feeling the strong north wind, it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction, over Deacon Farrar’s woods, ever rising higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight of it.

To Thoreau, the seed is an emigrant, flying off into the swirling night until the air goes still, until it “descries its promised land and settles gently down between the woods … and its voyage is over.” And yet this is only the beginning of another story, Henry reminds us, as the seed “stoops to rise.” And so it is the plant that journeys far beyond the scope of the moment: “from generation to generation it goes bounding over lakes and woods and mountains. How many myriads go sailing away thus?”

For an author so fixed and studied in a particular place, Thoreau’s disposition toward the end of his life seems to be growing into a metaphysics of dispersal, embracing the risk and uncertainty of dissemination. “We find ourselves in a world that is already planted,” Thoreau observes,” but is also still being planted as at first.”

In the darkness that grows between these plantings, we find our fertility in friends and fellowship. When I shared around some notes about Henry’s faith in a seed, my friend Jennifer Roberts, a great scholar of the arts of seeing, responded with pictures she had made of milkweed down—luminous, fragile, and somehow ferocious. One of these pictures radiantly ravels Henry’s whole story in a single image—the “prismatic tints” dancing along the silks, alive and spectral; the threads burgeoning and ballooning; and beyond, the soft landscape beckoning and enfolding, Henry’s “promised land” of “strange valleys” in whose lees the seed will settle to earth.

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Roberts

Jennifer’s images catch the glimmering presence of the life cycle as it abides in the instant, complete and incompletable. “These silken streamers have been perfecting themselves all summer,” Henry writes, “a prophecy not only of the fall, but of future springs.” A seed, a self—to say there’s no knowing what the future holds is a way of acknowledging the wildness, the vastness, of the present moment. The seeds it keeps, treasured in the soil or hidden in the sky radiant as they ride the winds beyond present sight, even as we know the seed must die into the earth to bring forth its abundance.

Amid the disasters we count and claim, the misfortunes we cast like coins, future flourishings, too, are annealing themselves in the fading light’s alchemy. “What is our labor in November now?” asks the writer Nina MacLaughlin, who is the laureate of this month and its light, and whose work helps to close the pages of this issue. “One job: Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. And every year emerge altered, ready, like lead to gold.” So pause here at the edge of the path while the dusk arranges itself around your shoulders, while the muffled roar steals into your auricles. Touch the seed-frosted goldenrod, watch those seeds swirl in the air to settle and disappear into the tangle. Sift a few milkweed tufts into the wind. Get intimate with the openness of it, with what my friend and Arnoldia contributor Nicholas Anderson calls “the hollowness of this moment” of the seed dispersing. Get in touch with the winter of it, when nothing and everything is happening.

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Yesterday, I had already locked the copy on my column when I came across a lecture by Malcolm Guite, the remarkable poet and Anglican priest with a musical mien and a trickster spirit. Guite’s Christianity is lyrical and intimate; the Trinity in his account is no mystery, but a kind of conversation, and though I am not a practicing Christian, I find his approach to the human predicament compelling. Listening to him, my ears pricked up especially when he came around to the Parable of the Sower, Jesus’s lesson about seeds that fall on rocky ground or good soil; and to John 12:24: Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Henry seems in dialogue with these Gospel strands, I thought, trusting the resilience of seeds, their bravery and inerrancy.

Still pondering the sower and the sown, the seed dying into its abundance, I closed my laptop and reflexively picked up my phone to scan my email: the subject line at the top of the queue was “The Overlooked Lesson of the Parable of the Sower.” The synchronicity ran through me like a shock—I actually tossed the phone across the sofa in alarm.

It turned out to be the headline of another resonant post from Alexis Madrigal, whose newsletter, Oakland Garden Club, is energizing and essential. Alexis was writing here about the Octavia Butler novel, but this only thickens the resonance—especially in this moment, when Butler’s fierce vision feels especially relevant.

“What is the point of talking about botanical beauty or mystery in times like these?” Alexis begins.² “Who could be thinking about flowers at a moment like this?” He turns to Butler and her protagonist, Olamina, with her message of human destiny in the stars. Alexis acknowledges the challenge, the trouble, with this vision of space colonization. It’s vision, though—the dream, the long-arc commitment, Alexis suggests, that is the overlooked lesson in Butler’s work. Vision is what we need; vision is what prepares the soil to receive the seed. Not only something to walk away from; something to walk toward. “Does the specific dream matter?” Alexis asks. “I’m not sure it does. And I would suggest a journey inwards into life, rather than outwards into space.” He gives further shape to this prophetic possibility, suggesting we look for it in our distinctive human role as “the life that knows all other life.”

I’m with Alexis here: I stand for the journey inwards into life.³ We could do worse than to begin with Thoreau, and with the seed that dies into the earth to bring forth its abundance.

1. I wrote about Henry’s milkweed visions in this newsletter last November, too.

2. There’s much more to Alexis’s post, including some tantalizing book news. Go have a look.

3. Alexis reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s recent Booker acceptance speech for Orbital, her novel of astronauts and their infatuation with the earth, which she dedicated to everyone who “speaks for and not against the Earth; for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life; and all the people who speak for and call for peace.” Orbital astonished, inspired, and humbled me as much as any novel I read in the past year.