The Preface: Finding my way to the seeds
I am going to play some catch up here because in all honesty, I have not kept up with the sharing of these stories the past months, even…
I am going to play some catch up here because in all honesty, I have not kept up with the sharing of these stories the past months, even with the clarity of the original instructions guiding me to do so. Let us rewind to February.
I hadn’t really paid much attention to dates in the past year — it seemed often that weeks blended in months and months into seasons. Life was on a different calendar, and I had needed that. As ‘2/6/2022’ appeared on the login screen of my computer, something stood out — as if it were the first time I registered a gregorian date in a long time. The dots connected; it had been exactly one year since leaving Daymaker after serving as its co-founder, CEO, and head of product for seven years. One year since I put my laptop away, and the central items of my desk had become my journal and my drawing pad. Something about seeing that date sent me into a spiral — I had taken the coveted year away — wasn’t I to know what called next? It was nearing time to be back in the world — to pour myself into something, watch it grow, and be filled by its fruits. But, the form of that creation felt no clearer then than it had a year ago when leaving Daymaker in search of something else that called.
Weeks passed, and the possibilities only seemed to climb. Every opportunity touching land stewardship, climate justice, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based-connection seemed as beautiful as the last. And while the excitement built, none of the open doors felt quite right. Parallel to this exploration of how I would show up in the world, in the touchable and immediate realms of my life, we were beginning preparations for our garden. For the first time in my being here on this land, there were a lot of people around. And our visions for what we could grow and tend here stretched to match the magnitude of all the energy surrounding us.
This led me to my collection of seeds — and when I say collection, I mean a handful of seed packets in a drawer, some of which I had grown on this land. I was no seedkeeper — not in the slightest sense. When moving here three years ago, I was a young person feeling the emptiness of what modernity had promised, and I looked to growing food as my hope to bring my mind and spirit back to the pace of my body. I was aware that 95% of our western diet came from beyond our bioregion when just 60 years ago, over 50% of our food came from our own backyard! Gardening felt like a way back to myself and a way to take part in changing a system that didn’t feel sustainable.
At the time, seeds were simply a necessary step in the tending of a garden; they didn’t mean much beyond this to me then. As I flipped through my colorful, paper packets, I fell upon De 18 Radish Jours — the very first seeds I put into the ground when landing in these mountains in 2019.
I remembered how I felt: Only 18 days after putting those seeds in, I had these magnificent red and pink vegetables the size of my thumb and luscious greens to cook alongside them. I ran inside — full in a way that felt unfamiliar — or perhaps incredibly familiar to my days as a child but a feeling absent as I had “grown up.” I had grown this. Well, not really. This Earth gift and her fecundity grew this, but I had played some role. And in a way more tangible than my long hours spent typing away at the keys of a computer, I was responsible for the nourishment that would bring me my next day. It was the beginning of something — and as I see it now, the beginning of some part of the rest of my life.
I continued flipping through the seeds from years’ past and the stories they evoked. The kale that bolted before I had a lunch’s harvest. The collards eaten by the pill-worms. The squash that never quite fruited. And the glass gem corn I tried boiling as a sweet corn. My for-ray into being in relationship with that which feeds me had not been so romantic. Ultimately, I had been doing it alone, and I struggled often under this weight. And yet, there were some memories — like those of my first radish harvest — that seemed to leave an imprint that would help guide the rest of my life.
It wasn’t long before the tangible of my world, the garden project, began to dance with this journey to find my next “calling.” I cannot remember what finally lifted the veil — a podcast, something someone said, or maybe the wildness of my heart meeting my mind on a long walk. But, starting one evening, I could not stop thinking about seeds and where they came from. Something had been germinating inside, and by some grace, it began to sprout. I felt five years old again, walking into the first day of kindergarten, absolutely innocent in my quest to learn something I knew so little about but was so hungry for.
Tomatoes, peppers, kale, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, wheat — these beings and all those who feed us in our modern diet–were not always here. Contrary to much of the way I came to understand “nature” through the scientific lens, these plants are not “wild.” They have been cultivated through thousands of years of evolution. Most of us would not recognize these plants if we visited their ancestors today. There was this beautiful, nuanced, and interdependent relationship between human and seed that gives us the abundance of nourishment, access, and variety we know today. Our evolution depended on the evolution of the seeds. And in this, the seeds were giving us something — trading their wildness to feed our species in some larger picture of Life.
There are seeds that have been tended for 8000+ years by ancestors of the peoples who originally helped guide these wild plants into the food we know today. These seeds are still around today— many barely hanging onto life as interest in convenience and comfort supersedes those agreements we made with the seeds millenniums ago. The seeds hold the stories of everything their peoples went through — the lives they led so more life could happen. So we could be here today.
The seeds carry the story of how the food and the people evolved together. Seeds for dry spells in the climate. Seeds for warmer years. Seeds for ceremony. Seeds for traditional feasts. Seeds for everyday flour. And as I took this in, I realized we could touch those very seeds, turn them into something that fed us today, and become a part of their interdependent story of evolution — was there more magic than this? I awoke in the middle of that very night, and the words “SeedStory” sat in the center of my awareness. It had happened quickly — the seeds had me in their field of influence, and I was only to be pulled deeper.
The next morning, some of this SeedStory vision distilled. And, it revealed itself through the lens of my lived experience these past years on the mountain. Ultimately, no matter how much I wanted to “be of the Earth” after so much of life in a story that I was separate from it all, learning gardening and then gardening alone had never quite found a rhythm in my system. Growing food to feed myself was hard — and it felt especially hard when there was such healthy and accessible produce from so many organic farms in my vicinity. To my critical mind, it felt inefficient and even selfish. I had other gifts that were more easily expressed in serving the world, and here I was trying to help seeds become my sustenance. My work in the garden had felt more transactional than I anticipated; I put seeds in the ground, I gave them water, and then I ultimately harvested them to feed me before they’re able to reproduce. It felt like another expression of the consumption/production paradigm that I was trying to step beyond in this chapter of life.
But that was the whole thing I could see clearly now — without any relationship to the seeds, I was just taking part in another transaction — a common expression in our dominant world where the human takes from the other-than-human world without anything given in return. As I came to learn about the seeds, seed saving, and their stories, I realized we humans played a huge part in their story and survival. And that had me jumping to be a part of this reciprocity where I sustained that which sustained all those before me and all those who would come after.
Suddenly, it wasn’t about growing nutrient-dense food so I could live a better life. Or be “more connected to the Earth.” It was so much bigger than that. If I knew the stories of the seeds and how much had been given to keep them alive, I’d tend to them like they were my children. It would be more about the seeds than the foods and medicines they produced. I would be stewarding life, and in some great gift back, they’d be taking care of me.
As I came to learn more about the keepers and tenders of these seeds — so many from lineages and cultures still in relationship with the Old Ways– I saw that the seeds were carrying these stories of another way of being on Earth. I realized what I was really longing for in my first experiment in gardening three years ago was touching some other possibility of life. It wasn’t so much about the kale grown on the land I lived (although that has its own beauty in itself); it was that growing the food that fed me brought me into this totally new reality of being in a relationship to Life. And these storied seeds — they were actually carrying these realties.
They had been touched and tended by thousands of years of people who knew a lot more about being on Earth than I had ever been taught. Kept alive by people facing ever imaginable form of oppression and still carrying these seeds forth because they knew some bigger story of Life. And in being in relationship with the seeds, I was feeding this yearning for some other story of humanity — feeding it on a multitude of levels. The seeds were a way of being in relationship with peoples who were carrying a long view of this life on Earth.
And so, the texture of SeedStory started to come to be: what if we could gather these seeds and stories and share them in a super-accessible way for families that were looking to explore gardening? Families hungry for a connection to another story of the world — just like I was. We could send boxes throughout the year with everything a family would need to tend the seeds, and we’d come together online to hear and touch the reality of these seedkeepers and their ways. And we’d share our stories, mishaps, and wild joys. The children would be at the center, carrying that wide-heartedness we need to find our way back to that which lives beyond the veil of modernity. These precious heirloom seeds would become our teachers. These wouldn’t just be seeds in a paper packet you buy every year to get your kale and tomatoes. These would be seeds we felt responsible for. We’d be stepping into their story. And we would be doing it together.
I wondered if could guide families into gardening by guiding them into the stories of the seeds — the way it used to always be before the big hybrid seed companies came in with their promises of better crops for less labor. The seeds never used to be separate from the raising of food. The cycle of nourishment only continued if the seeds were well taken care of. I hoped that by bringing these two pieces back together, this act of tending the Earth would resonate for people in a way that I had missed in my early attempt to be a gardener.
I reached out to a handful of people I admired and trusted in the space of tending our soils. And each of those warm-hearted, earth-loving people opened five more doors. And my weeks suddenly became full talking to farmers and seedkeepers and living in an entire ecosystem I was totally unaware of just a month prior. There were so many brilliant peoples whose lives were dedicated in service to these seeds. And here I was, drinking from a spring of the sweetest waters. That desk that had entered a new chapter of writing and reflection after I left Daymaker, it now became a mix of books, seeds, soil, and a human standing behind it in total wonder. These days felt like some celebration; I so often found my hands reaching towards the sky in a childlike praise as the voice coming out of the speaker in my phone told me of their seeds and their ways. It was like discovering something I had unknowingly been looking for all along.
The rapture of this totally new world sat alongside a curiosity in my mind of the eventual formation of SeedStory. I felt the need for structure and sustenance, and I was framing conversations through the lens of how they could fit into this larger vision. By this time, it was late March, and I knew we had only a few weeks if we wanted to start sending seed boxes to a small selection of families across the southeast for the growing season. This possibility felt so real to me — especially because, in all honesty, I wanted it for myself and the people around me. I wanted to humbly find my way back to this ancient practice through a community of others finding their way, all tending the same seeds and helping keep alive the very same stories.
Alongside these questions, I was in an exploration with my beloved around where home would be. It had been a dark and difficult chapter the past few years for me on this land, and I had an idea we were to begin our family and life together elsewhere. We shared a vision for old-growth forest, space for seeds that fed many, animals roaming, room for community, and land that could serve as shelter for centuries to come. I started looking, and nothing was quite right. We sent emails, made calls, and laid down the prayers we knew to make to bring us what we really needed. As the weeks passed, the search had an energy of me pushing a timeline, and, of course, I kept hitting walls. “One or two more weeks”, I’d say, “and then we’ll know; the perfect place will show up.”
During this time, seeds were arriving in my heart, mind, and mailbox on a daily basis. Each conversation in the world of seeds was opening more doors, and behind these doors lived seeds calling out for tending. Once a story was shared with me, I felt a responsibility to help keep it alive. And here I had a way of doing so with the seeds, my hands, and the soil of this land. At some point, these two timelines met — the thread of my impatient desire for a forever home crossing with the beauty of what was naturally unfolding with the seeds. It was time to give these seeds life, and that felt more important than any future happenings.
So, very simply, we put the seeds in the soil, on this 4 acres of land that had held so much of my journey, surrounded by a growing community of people we loved. And in doing so, I started to see how this could become our forever place. It was all in how we held it, and the seeds were asking of me to hold a longer view of what was unfolding. This became the first big gift the seeds gave me. A place I could start to become a person of.
In this realization of the home that sat before my eyes, it became very clear that we were not to launch something like SeedStory into the world quite yet. My attention and my lifeforce were to go into the story that was unfolding on this land. The seeds had a lot to teach me; that was evident. And here I had quite the perfect place to learn. So, those original instructions I mentioned at the beginning of this post, they went something like:
Care for these seeds that come to you — knowing Life’s dependency, your wellness, and your people’s wellness upon them. Talk to them as you bring them to Life in the soil. Tell them what you’re needing, and pay attention to what feeds them. Your journey back to these seeds is a part of a much greater coming home. Be willing to experience and feel deeply — including all the places where you feel lost or stuck or far away. And please, please be open to sharing this story through the written words with those around you. This is the inception of SeedStory.
So, here we are. Late, but here. Beginning to share some of what moves, grows, and takes new (and ancient) form on this land and within the landscape of my heart. I’m not sure what’s to come of this; I feel committed to putting into words the moments that move me as we tend these precious seeds. The doors that swing open, looking for a human visitor in a space where we’ve been absent for some time. The life and death that cycle through as I try to find my way back to Something.
So, what follows is my earnest attempt at sharing these happenings. I offer these seeds and their stories through the lens of my experience being in relationship with them, knowing they’re finding unique expression in so many other ways. If you’re wanting to be here, I hope these tales feed something in you. And I hope in that watering of your Life, we can see how you, too, are helping keep these seeds alive.
Thomas, June 2022
You can read Chapter 1: The Lumbee Sweet Potato, here.
If you want to follow along on this journey as new stories emerge, there are a few options:
To the right of this story, you’ll see a photo of some corn with the title “SeedStory Tales.” If you have a medium account, click the email icon next to the “follow” button. From my understanding, you’ll get an email each time I write a new post.
You can follow along on Instagram here.