SEEDING YOUR NEW STORY

Planting seeds for our emergent future is a journey that is always vulnerable and deeply tender. These seeds are silent whispers of prayer, keepsakes of the vision we hold for ourselves and each other. Planted in the fertile dark, they become our secret longings, quiet emissaries of possibility.

The journey is always inspired. In seeding a new story for our lives, we are ready to re-imagine and re-envision a narrative in which we are held in the sacred sweetness of love (versus fear), honored and celebrated for our unique gifts, and nourished by a bright vision of showing up in the world with authentic presence, curiosity, and wonder.

In planting new seeds, we find ourselves standing at this liminal place between stories. We may be ready to be shaken up, willing to release old patterns, limited beliefs and weary habits that no longer serve who we are becoming. We may find ourselves adrift in a sea of vague longings, even as we have exiled ourselves from our old story. We may discover that in planting new seeds there is hesitancy for we are being asked to befriend the unknown, the wild and the unpredictable.

This space between two stories can be terrifying. It is our fertile void.

Just as the caterpillar has to die and dissolve into a soup of liminal possibility in order to transform into the winged butterfly, so in seeding new beginnings, we find ourselves dying to an old way of being. It is in this place of dissolution and death that we begin to sense the birthing of new possibilities.

This process cannot be rushed. It takes infinite patience to plant these sacred seeds into the gardens of our imagination. We have to tread carefully. Often, in our need to find our grounding quickly, we can become impatient and desperate, seeking to step into a new story that is as yet not ready to receive us. As Lao Tse Tsu cautions, “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
Do you?

There is nothing more exhilarating – and terrifying - than planting seeds for a new story in which each of us envisions the kind of world we want to live in. We arrive at a threshold, knowing that even as we are ready to close doors to a past that we are ready to release, new doors are waiting to be opened.

We arrive as dreamers of a new dream, weavers of a new story, map makers and myth makers, alchemists willing to transform the grit of a tired old story into the gold of an enlivened new story - one that holds possibility and promise.

The journey always starts with a seed. And the courage it takes to plant that new seed.

Mandala drawing, colored pencil. From my book Dear Beloved: Sacred Messages to the World.