Plant Seeds for Your Soul

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the idea that you could put a seed in the dirt and it would grow. I think most of us go through that at some point. I’ve been watching my children go through it right now, the projects they bring home from class, the things they talk about, the excitement of watching something change. It reminded me of when I used to feel the same way. You just get so busy with life that you forget about cool stuff like that. You stop thinking about it. Not until you’re much older, when people tend to circle back to gardens and plants and growing things. But I think we should all stay into it, because it’s interesting and it’s all around us. And it’s a form of life!

I remember summers in Dayton, Ohio, staying with my grandma. There was a woman across the street who grew these wonderful gardens. Nothing huge. Just tomatoes, different plants, herbs. I can’t remember exactly what she had, but as a kid, seeing something like that, watching things come out of the ground that someone planted and cared for, it showed you what’s possible. Especially due to the fact that it was in the middle of the neighborhood. It was a small, quiet kind of magic.

My wife connects with this deeply. That’s her thing. That’s how she connects with her roots. She gets out and plants flowers all over the yard at a certain point every year, and the next thing you know, there are flowers everywhere. It makes the house beautiful and watching her do it reminded me that this has always been around me in some form.

With my family, I’ve gotten back into it. Nothing crazy. We have a small garden that we enjoy growing out here and learning alongside them has been a reminder of how much we stop paying attention to as adults. The basics of how a plant grows from a seed. The soil, the seasons, the sunlight, the water. We all learned about this as children. We drew the illustrations in class. We watched the time-lapse videos. And then somewhere along the way, we stopped learning about it.

The point I want to make is that we should keep learning.

There’s something grounding about working with nature. Putting your hands in the dirt, planting something, waiting for it, and watching it come up, taking care of it. It requires patience. It requires attention. And it costs almost nothing. A seed in the dirt is damn near free. An herb system for your kitchen is inexpensive. The technology out there now makes it easier than ever to grow things indoors year round if you want to.

But beyond the practical side, there’s something deeper about it. Nature has its own process. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t skip steps. A seed doesn’t become a flower overnight. It goes through stages, and each one matters. There’s a lesson in that for all of us, and it’s one I keep relearning through my kids.

Maybe we can all learn from them. Maybe we can all learn from nature. The things that have always been around us, the things we used to wonder about as children, they’re still there. We just stopped looking.