Miracle of the Seed

by Joanne Blum, Ph.D.

In my hand I hold a packet of seeds. They’re for a kind of orange Oriental poppy I have always wanted in my garden. Every year, seduced by the brightly colored packets in the garden stores, I grow something new from seed. Giant zinnias. Coleus. One year it was a whole wildflower garden. This year it will be poppies. I gaze at these tiny black specks in the palm of my hand and am stunned at their contents. How could everything the plant needs be in there?

From the smattering of botany I’ve picked up, I know there’s considerable reason to admire the humble seed. Built into it—like the DNA in our cells—are all the characteristics a plant needs to flourish and grow. Plants are “totipotent”—a new word for me--which means they have within them all the genetic information needed for their perfect maturation.

The life-fostering characteristics of a plant’s seeds are elegant. For instance, every seed is equipped with what’s called a seed coat, its purpose being to protect it from disease and insects, and to prevent water from penetrating it too soon, initiating the germination process prematurely. I think of the protective mantle that has seemed to surround me at times and wonder if it is a similar gift of creation. As a young woman in Manhattan, fresh from a small midwestern town, I wandered innocently and ignorantly up one side of New York island and down the other, getting lost on the subways, wandering through dangerous and decrepit parts of the city, but somehow, amazingly, staying safe. Are we girded with a seed coat of sorts, protecting us from things that would rush or damage our tender growth?

Probably a plant’s best-known life-giving feature is its innate ability to turn toward and soak up light. Heliotropism, or phototropism, it’s called. This capacity, so integral to the photosynthesis process, is built right into its seed because the plant’s very survival depends on it.

It is no different for human beings. We have a comparable capacity for intuiting sources of enlightenment. We know when we’ve found good spiritual food, and when we have not. I think of the people who wander into my church, having found their way by some internal radar they may be only vaguely aware of. Some visit us only briefly and go on, following their radar elsewhere. Some stay and grow with us for quite a while, sensing they have found a nourishing source of light. I trust people’s inner radar implicitly, which is why I have so little of the missionary instinct. The last thing I would want would be to persuade someone, by force of personality, or theology, or subtle coercion of any kind, to take in spiritual food that doesn’t agree with them. It’s like trying to force a youngster to eat peas or Brussels sprouts. All you do this way is increase their animosity to vegetables and make them sick to their stomachs. Leave them to their own discernment, and they’ll find their way eventually to good food they can grow on.

Our inner orientation to light isn’t the only ground we share with vegetation, though. We share other traits designed to ensure our growth, despite sometimes challenging environments. I was interested to learn, for instance, that the leaves of plants contain special cells called “guard cells,” which open or close according to temperature, moisture, and other external conditions. If it’s too wet, the guard cells will close so the plant won’t take in more moisture than is good for it. If it’s a dry season, the cells will open wide to take in all the natural replenishment they can get.

Under adverse conditions, a plant’s seed even knows how to temporarily halt its growth—a feature called “seed dormancy”—until growing conditions are more favorable. Sometimes that dormant period lasts quite a while, life being what it is, and good growing conditions being as difficult to locate as they sometimes are.

On vacation in Florida a few years ago, my husband and I had the pleasure of visiting a nature preserve on Sanibel Island, where we were introduced to the area’s fascinating wildlife and vegetation. We got good close-up looks at cormorants, alligators, osprey, and a hundred other natural wonders and delights. But we were particularly entranced with Florida’s mangrove trees, and their intricate root systems like huge, natural cages. All kinds of vegetation, shellfish, and other forms of life were all mixed in with the mangrove roots, creating what appeared to be floating islands.

“Everything begins with the mangrove trees,’ said our nature preserve guide. He explained the mangrove’s remarkable propagation system--the way the tree’s cigar-shaped seedpod drops into the surrounding water and floats off through the area’s many natural waterways, and then continues to float—for two years or more—until it lands on just the right fertile spot for it to take root and grow. In the meantime, the seed’s capacity for dormancy keeps all its potentials strong and viable.

Once the seed’s germination begins and the tree starts to grow, a whole chain of life takes shape. As the roots develop, micro-organisms begin to grow on them, finding them a rich source of nutrition and support. Then crustaceans come to feed on the micro-organisms that are living on the roots. Then the fish and the birds come to feed on the crustaceans, that are feeding on the micro-organisms, that are thriving on the roots. It’s the house that Jack built in living biological color! From one floating seedpod, finally taking root and growing toward maturity, a whole ecosystem is born.

Since taking that Florida tour, I’ve noticed that the “mangrove effect” is also operable in the lives of human beings. Surely we too have a seedpod of power-packed potential within us, which gives us the capacity to find fertile ground, take in nourishment, and grow toward maturity. Frequently we too find that we are floating around a good long while, seeking a commodious place to grow, before we finally get situated, put down roots, and start becoming ourselves.

And if the mangrove parallel holds, which I think it does, then we must remember the great lesson of the mangroves--that the seed in each of us is deeply important--why else would it need all that innate intelligence to protect and sustain it?—and deeply influential. For us too, a whole eco-system is the result of the growth of our inner seed, just as it is in the growth of the mangroves. If we honor and nourish that seed within us, and help it grow, the ripple effects of our spiritual maturation are greater and farther-reaching than any of us can imagine.

I believe this is what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he pointed to the lowly mustard seed, and told his disciples it was like the kingdom of heaven. The seed of the mustard plant, Jesus said, though among the smallest of seeds, when grown, “becomes the greatest of shrubs . . . so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31). Such is the influence of a single tiny seed—whether in a plant or in a person—when it finally comes to flower. The life comes in. The ripples go out. New lives are nourished and grow. It’s the mangrove’s story all over again.

We’ve all participated in this miracle of the seed. We are all doing so now, as we make life-enhancing choices that help us grow, and as we reap the rewards of others’ fertile growth. I was reminded of this recently when doing some reading about Emile Coue, a French pharmacist and self-styled psycho-therapist, who created in the early 1900’s a popular form of therapy involving self-hypnosis. He operated a free clinic in Nancy, France for many years to which people came in great numbers to learn his auto-suggestion technique and use it to heal themselves of various limiting physical and mental conditions.

I’d never heard of Coue until recently—he was apparently much more popular in Europe than in the United States—but once I became aware of his work, I began to see ripple effects of it everywhere. Dr. Robert Muller said it was Coue’s book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, that gave him the tools he needed to survive imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, and later to build a long and influential career in the United Nations. Muller, often referred to as a “prophet of hope,” said it was Coue who helped him develop his capacity for optimism. Only a little further digging revealed that Coue’s work also influenced Norman Vincent Peale, that early light of New Thought and Positive Christianity, not to mention other luminaries like Bernie Siegel , Robert Schuller, O. Carl Simonton, and countless others.

When I really began to grasp all the lives that were nurtured in some way by Coue’s fertile seedpod journey—the people who visited his clinic, the families and communities those people returned to with their new knowledge about self-healing, the books that were written by Coue, and then by the writers and teachers he inspired, and the people who read those books, and the healings that occurred in individuals, families, and countries around the world as a result of that reading—it became pretty clear that the germination and growth of one, little-known French pharmacist spawned ripple effects so far-reaching we could never reach their end.

And this is true of all our lives. The impact of one person, growing toward spiritual maturity and becoming a healthy being at work in the world, is profound. Others gravitate to such a person—like the micro-organisms gravitating to the roots of the mangroves—like the birds coming to nest in the branches of the mustard trees—to learn how to grow themselves into all they can be. And then, when the time is ripe, they pass along this nourishment to others, and even more beings are nourished, and healed, and grow into whatever they are capable of becoming. The cycle is ongoing and immense.

My husband’s first wife, Fran, over the years of her cancer treatment, found a remarkable number of ways to continue her own seedpod’s growth, and to contribute to others’ growth at the same time. One seemed to flow naturally into another. An experience of hardship, a deepening of compassion, led inevitably to an idea for others’ benefit. This is the usual flow of healthful engagement with life, is it not?—from personal to communal, from gift received to gift given, from lesson learned to lesson taught.

A shining example of this was Fran’s persistent effort to build more personal support services for cancer patients. After her first major operation, Fran became keenly aware of the hospital’s lack of emotional or spiritual support for patients. Little effort was being made to educate people about the disease, symptoms, or treatment protocols they were dealing with. The most common feelings among cancer patients were fear, frustration, and helplessness. Family members felt similarly helpless and fearful as they struggled to support their ill loved ones.

Having worked for many years at the university with which this cancer hospital was affiliated, Fran began to use her influence to raise funds for, and build interest in, better support services for cancer patients and their families. It took several years, but eventually, a new department for “patient services and education” took shape. Fran herself hired the first director, a compassionate woman with her own history of illness and hospitalization.

One of the first programs offered by this fledgling department was a “Cancer Caregivers Support Group,” a weekly group for anyone caring for a loved one with cancer, and one of the members of that first caregivers group was Fran’s own husband—now my husband—Joe, who found himself the direct beneficiary of his wife’s compassionate, far-reaching idea. As a result of the ripples Fran created—ripples that are still expanding—Joe was supported by this loving group of fellow caregivers during the last months of his wife’s life, and for many months afterward, as he grieved and healed, and then as he helped others grieve and heal, and go on.

Reflecting on all those who were blessed by the fruits of Fran’s spiritual maturity—from immediate family members to countless people she never met—I am awed and amazed. It’s the same amazement I feel staring at the poppy seeds in my hand on this early summer’s day.

As I prepare to plant these tiny seeds, I hope I will remember this—I hope we will all remember this—that each of us, whoever we are and wherever we are planted, has this great, powerful seedpod of life within us. And it is all-important that we not squander this seed, but that we treat it tenderly and reverently, knowing that its growth in us is work we’re meant to do, and that there is an intelligence guiding us in it as surely as there is in the plants.

As we follow our deep, wise instincts on how to nourish that seed in us, and bring it to bud, and then to nourish others who are finding their own way into flower, the impact on our collective garden will be immeasurable.