Are you tending your seeds?

For those new to The Wild Now, welcome to a tiny, month-long experiment I’m calling, The Joy Experiment. It began April 1st. You can learn more it about by checking out previous issues below.

I began thinking about what to share with you by saying, today is one of those days that carries meaning in many forms. Though, we’re innate meaning-makers, so everyday can be ‘one of those days.’

For some, it’s Easter. For others, it’s the culmination of Passover. For many, it’s simply Sunday.

Still, even ‘simply sunday’—literally, the day of the sun—carries so much history. The word, rooted in earth-centric and ancestral traditions, honors that firey ball’s life-giving force, its reappearance after what were truly dark nights.

The traditions may differ, but beneath them is something shared: a thread of renewal. A belief—quiet or bold—that something within us is always becoming.

Moving deeper into spring, this is also the season of seeds.

Of what begins small, softening underground.

Of what breaks open in order to grow.

Joy is like that, too. Not always bright. Not always loud. A little pulse of aliveness, asking for light.

Saturday | April 19, 2025 from my journal

The last week, tenuous. More than one visit to ‘the precipice’—what I call those moments when my husband’s diminishing health leaps toward that final place, both of us thinking, This may be it. This may really be it.

What can I do? My mind asks, that question circling in my head like a persistent bee.

So no wonder that my mind answers, Be here.

I focus on the being, being with him, being present within my own shaken nervous system, navigating his suffering and confusion. Caregiver me doing what the hospice and palliative care team have taught me about defusing pain and bringing calm.

We ride it all out alone. I-love-you’s exchanged, until the awfulness begins to pass and he dozes off.

Then I tend to me.

A few days from now, he may remember little, if any, of the tumultuous hours we just spent.

Good that he doesn’t need to remember. I am the memory-carrier, though after years and quite a few visits to ‘the precipice,’ my body feels heavy, bear-ish, lumbering and wanting a bit of hibernation I can’t yet have.

So after a vigilant night, here I am at my rolltop desk, a stuffed rat with a dapper red scarf (a gift from a faraway friend) rooting me on.

Both cats are sleeping nearby, one on my robe, the other on a berber overshirt I wore yesterday while working in the garden. They seem to like sleeping in the scent of me, a feline compliment, though perhaps it’s the tinge of dug-up earth and Calla lily pollen. Both robe and shirt have played in dirt. I guess I need to do laundry later.

I pull my first book, Mosslight, from the bookshelf where most of the poetry books live.

I like to keep it nestled near Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, William Stafford, Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Lucille Clifton, Ilya Kaminsky, W. S. Merwin, Jean Valentine, Pablo Neruda, so many more, and a newer discovery, Danush Laméris. Such a love affair with poets, here and long gone.

Randomly I’ve opened to this poem:

Seeds
All morning, a pocket full of seeds—
morning glories from Zimbabwe,
moon flowers from China, the Cosmos
of Tanzania, Japanese trowel opening
this ground, and on the cedar bench,
chá preto, Brazilian black tea steaming.
This hill of mud and mulch holds
all my pretty pebbles hauled
from the mouth of the Mad River
and hours kneeling at Agate Beach,
the occasional fossil moved with me
from Pennsylvania, Washington, old oceans
turned stone, the impression of shells beside
shells of limpets and periwinkles
brought home from Fiji.
A global garden here.
The hands of strangers touched
each seed, so every blossom
will bear a sweetness, the unmet life
shadowing each interior, the tongues
of hummingbirds back from Mexico,
tongues thin as pins pricking deep,
will shine, a brief blur, licking.

Is it weird to be comforted by your own poem? No, a voice echoes, seeming bigger than me. What do you think?

These words began as seeds in another journal in another place and time in my life. This poem is a vine reaching from then to now, to this journal, to this body and mind, to this room in this moment.

I think of the Celine Dion song, My Heart Will Go On. It's often called a sad song, but really, it's about how we do 'go on.' Enduring, resilient.

Maybe that song is with me because this clip of a little girl singing it popped up, sweet and happy, in my YouTube feed last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-Pj30kSgyw

There are tears. There is gratitude.

There is savoring the reality that we’ve both lived to tell our story another day, and tomorrow we’ll be with dear friends, sipping and eating and laughing.

There are the big, famous, long-ago resurrections, and there are all the small, behind-closed-doors, personal resurrections one can easily overlook, underestimate, forget to celebrate.

There’s knowing this: ‘God willing and the crick don’t rise,’ as my grandmother used to say, this moment is the seed for a future time when I will look back, knowing I did my best.

I wish the same for you, reading this, right now in the warmth of your still-here, one-and-only, animal body.

I’m calling this moment, grace. Calling it, joy. Smiling, I’m rocking back and forth, whispering, Yes, yes, yes.

A practice: Noticing your “little pulse of aliveness” today + a larger question

Here’s a super simple and short practice for you to try today . . . or any day or every day.

• Pick a random time. I’m going with 7:11 (am or pm, or bonus, both). Then set a reminder on your smartphone or other timer.
  
• When it goes off at ‘your time,’ for just one minute (though feel free to linger longer), look around and soften your focus. Listen, feel, breathe in, open your senses, be in that moment.
  
• Doesn’t matter where you are, alone or at a gathering, inside or out. You can do this even without anyone noticing that you are noticing what’s there in that random yet chosen time.
  

❥ Notice—without judgment—something around you that brings even the tiniest sense of okay-ness.
- A spot of color, texture, or pattern.
- The way voices talking all at once can sound like hummingbird wings, buzzing.
- A patch of light stretched across a table leg.
- A long-cherished knick-knack on a shelf or a dust-kitten in the corner.
- The way you feel in your body, physically, in your face or belly or hands in your lap.

• Ask yourself: Is there joy here with me, or lightness of being, or at least some okay-ness? Can I sense the enough-ness of the moment, the enough-ness of me in that tiny space of time deepened by my noticing it?

Comments & Community

If you feel up to sharing how you're answering this question, comments are incredibly welcomed—and I will respond. Your shared experience may be just the support and inspiration someone else needs.