Thinning Seedlings

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do here at Spirit Hill Farm is to thin seedlings.

I don’t know what I thought when I dropped two or four or six seeds in one little inch of earth. I guess I thought only one plant would pop out. Instead, suddenly it was like I had four babies in one car seat. I HAD to do something, for without enough space to stretch and grow, a plant won’t thrive.

Sorry, I said, pulling a green-leafed thread of will out of the dirt. Sorry sorry sorry.  

Weeks earlier I’d gotten two plastic growing trays, covers, heating mats, grow lights, a spray bottle. Oh, the thrill of lifting the cover that first morning some of the seeds had sprouted! Their tiny hopeful selves greeting the lighted world! 

Somehow I had lived 55 years without ever knowing how small a lettuce seed is. To put a speck of seed into dirt and to have it come to life, to have it break the surface!—I used to tease my mom when I was a kid because she would come downstairs spring mornings and greet her seedlings before she said hi to us, but now I understood. I would have done the same thing! Kids are miracles, but they have been around. They’re so much more fully sprouted. We forget kids are miracles sometimes because they’re so...loud. 

Seedlings are like whispered prayers. 

So how do you pull a baby plant from the earth? How do you say not you?

What helped me was the meditations I’ve been doing every morning and night. My friend Laura Foote gave me a special Joe Dispenza program, and I’ve been dedicated to it because I’ve been reading Joe Dispenza’s books for years, and I believe he is onto something when it comes to our bodies and our minds and our habits of living in the past. My goal is to be more in the present and the future than the past, and if meditating twice a day for an hour or so may help, I’m in.

In the meditations, you pull up on your pelvic floor to drive the old emotions and thoughts up your spine—your mind! that bossy thing that thinks it’s saving you by keeping you small—and out the top of your head. Just bear with me. I’m radically oversimplifying and, in doing so, making it sound weirder than it actually is. If you are a yogini this may sound very familiar to you.  

The way I began to picture this action was that all my arteries, my veins, all the tiny capillaries were full of old stories, emotions, thoughts, and that when I pulled up on my pelvic floor, it was like, from the top of my head, I was pulling a seedling, roots and all, from my body, freeing me of what no longer served me. 

Roots are so complicated! They aren’t like we learned to draw in elementary school, like fingers. They are like our arteries, our veins, our capillaries. They just get finer and finer, more and more hair-like, more and more like whispers carrying life.  

I got to LOVE the feeling of pulling roots out of my body. Imagine if someone could pull one string from the top of your head and all your old habits, all your old thoughts, fears, memories, emotions got gently tugged out into the endless universe where they could find a more expansive home into which they could float away or stay, close by me, in a place I could access but did not have to carry—the way iTunes stores all my music in a cloud somewhere. That would leave your internal self so clean, full and empty at the same time; for if you remove the old, then there is space for the unknown to enter.  

You aren’t empty when you pull out the past, your reactions to things people say and do, your habits, your old ways of thinking. You are full of listening life. 

And so I began pulling seedlings with greater abandon. I realized I had been thinking from small mind: a seedling belongs in the ground from which it sprouted, but didn’t the seedling also sprout from the planet Earth? When I put the seedling back on the ground, curled in on itself, seemingly lifeless, isn’t it still itself? Isn’t it just going home? Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. It’s still home. It’s living in service to the greater picture.

As an adoptee, I saw everything with small mind. I thought of mother with a small m instead of Mother Earth. We are part of something enormous, just as the wave is to the ocean. When we use small mind: I am this color; you are that color; I have money; You have no money; My mother didn’t keep me so I must be garbage--we miss the point: we are life. We are part of a web. We are the web. 

What I am saying is that I feel as if I have new glasses on. My old ones had these tiny lenses that only let me see what was right in front of me, and, as a result, mostly I thought me me me me and I am not safe I am not safe I am not safe.

I still think that way, but I am working on changing. 

Something is pulsing through me, through us. 

I have the feeling we’re only getting the smallest taste of what’s to come, for few people willingly radically change their way of life without being under terrible pressure or at the bottom of an abyss. I blacked out my Instagram pages as so many other people did, but this did not cost me anything.  

What am I willing to give up to really be alive, to really be web, ocean, human?

How much do I love this planet? How much do I love you? How much do I love the two seedlings, the one that stays, the one that goes? 

What percent of me says YES to life? What percent says NO?

What am I saying NO to?

And why?

Better:

What am I saying YES to?

And why?

Once upon a time, we were all seeds. The rest is for us to make up.