The Seed Keeper

Last year, I began collecting seeds.

It wasn't something I intentionally set out to do. I had returned to the lands where I was born, in the mountains of southeastern British Columbia, for a deeply personal reason. My father passed away a couple of years ago, and I had come back to scatter his ashes at the ski hill in Kimberley, probably his favourite place in the world.

Being there brought me back into a landscape that holds so much of my own history. There is so much I love about that land, the mountains, the rivers, the forests, but it is the ponderosa pines that have always held a special place in my heart. I have so many memories of those trees, walking beneath them as a child, a teenager and a young adult. I remember the feeling of the long needles beneath my feet; the smell of the forest and the deep sense of peace I felt amongst them. It is a feeling that remains with me still.

There is something about being amoungst the ponderosa pines that feels like home in a way I can’t quite articulate. It is as though my body recognizes that sense of belonging before my mind does. While I was there last year, I noticed some seeds scattered on the ground. I bent down, picked a few up and brought them home with me.

At the time, I didn't think much of it. But since then, seeds have continued to find their way into my life. Different places, different plants and trees, different moments, yet they have remained a persistent presence in my life. With the return to these lands only a couple of weeks away, I’ve found myself thinking more deeply about these seeds and what they might be trying to teach me.

I am at a stage of life when many of the landscapes I once thought would always be there are changing. The large family gatherings I remember from childhood aren't there anymore. Many of my aunts and uncles are growing older or gone. My father has passed away and my mom has Alzheimer's. Houses have been sold and people have moved. The places that once held all of us together still exist, but not in the same way.

There is a particular kind of grief in watching the geography of your childhood remain while the people who populated it slowly disappear.

Last year, my mission was to bring my father home and scatter his ashes. It was an honour to do so. What I hadn’t anticipated was what would unfold on the drive home.  

The highway home takes me past the road where my aunt and uncle used to live. When we were kids, whenever we left after a visit, it was a little family tradition for my dad to honk the horn as we passed, a simple way of saying, “see you later”.

As I drove past their place, I honked, for old times, and something in me broke open. The grief came pouring out in a way it hadn't for a very long time. I was crying so hard that I remember thinking I should probably pull over. I didn't. I kept driving, at highway speeds, tears streaming down my face, moving farther and farther away.

I've thought about that moment many times since. There I was, quite literally driving away from my grief. And to no surprise, the grief didn't stay behind. It came home with me, where it has lingered over this past year, like an open wound that hasn't quite closed. Maybe some grief never completely does. In fact, I’m learning that, with time, it can become less intense, softening until we can once again feel the love that has always lived beneath it.

This year, I am going back, but the mission is different. This time, I want to stop. My intention is to sit with the grief I couldn't sit with last year. I want to let myself feel the loss of my father, my mother's changing mind, my aging family, and the gatherings, places and versions of home and family that I will never be able to return to in quite the same way.

And somewhere in all of this, I keep thinking about those seeds. A seed is such a small thing to carry so much. It is what remains after a season of growth has finished. Something has reached maturity. Something has been released. And yet, held inside that tiny seed is the possibility of continuation. Not repetition, but continuation, the promise of something new.

A seed does not recreate the season that came before it. It carries something essential from that season forward, taking root in different soil, under different conditions, in another time. Maybe that is what I have been collecting. Not just seeds, but little pieces of continuity, glimmers of what remains.

Maybe those glimmers become new traditions born from old ones, new ways to gather, or simply the memory of my father's horn and allowing that ordinary little ritual to live on through me.

Perhaps that is what the seeds have been teaching me all along. They carry what has been gathered from one season into the next, reminding me that life moves through a constant cycle of endings and beginnings, death and rebirth. We grieve what has been lost, while gathering what remains and allowing something new to emerge.  

So this year, I am returning to the ponderosa pines. I will sit with what hurts. I will remember and I will grieve, but I will also keep my eyes on the ground for seeds. Somewhere amongst the losses are the refined materials of my youth: the love, belonging, memories, rituals and pieces of home that are still mine to carry.

And when I am ready, mine to plant again.