Yesterday I planted seeds. Literal ones in dirt that I turned over with a shovel. Hours of digging turned a weedy patch of grass
Into a patch of dirt
It doesn’t look like much. The edges are ragged. The stump in the middle is oddly shaped. (The stump was the reason the patch couldn’t be mowed.) It is just dirt.
But I sprinkled that dirt with seeds. The seeds don’t look like much either. They’re just specks that vanish the moment I sprinkle them. Yet those specks have the potential to grow into flowering plants. Digging the earth and scattering the seeds is an act of faith in the future. A gift to my future self. She will get to enjoy flowers while now I just get to feel tired and dirty. And accomplished. I’ve been intending this garden ever since we built our pandemic patio and had to chop down our dying walnut tree. Five years I’ve carried this idea in my head. Now it is begun.
This garden has more work ahead of it. Future me will need to create defined edges and set it up so that the garden bed and surrounding lawn are kept separate. Over the next several months I’ll get to see which of the seeds actually sprout and where my scattering left bare patches. I may need to thin out some plants where seeds clumped together. But I did the groundwork today which makes future work possible.
There are other areas of my life where I am metaphorically doing groundwork and scattering seeds for the future. I live in a brain that is constantly watchful for conditions and trends. I read headlines and spin ten possible futures fully rendered with alarm klaxons and lists for how I should prepare. But all of that is reactive, as if I have no guiding hand in what the future will bring. And, true, my ability to control large scale events is small-to-nothing. I can’t roll back climate change, or restore a just-bulldozed historical treasure, or fix uncountable inhumane treatments of people, but I am not completely powerless. I can lay small, local groundwork for a future I want to have instead of just trying to survive what comes at me.
In eight months my patch of dirt may be gloriously abloom, or it may be a mess of re-growing grass and dirt. But the work I did means that flowers are possible when they weren’t possible before. A small patch of flowers doesn’t fix the world, but it might mean everything to a bee. It makes something better and more beautiful. Something is better than nothing.