The Seed Ritual
for hope and patience
I’m Jo, a maker, grower and musician, nurturing a life-long devotional practice of weaving nature and ritual into the everyday. This is a place for seekers of untamed edges, the imperfect and the meaningful with twice monthly tales from the woods, garden and hearth. Gather in, rest and deepen your relationship with the beguiling beauty and feral corners of the natural world.
There’s rarely a time when I don’t feel better being surrounded by nature. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve felt held and protected in the woods or the garden, comforted in a non-judgemental space by the non-human world. I take my troubles to nature. And although I know that doesn’t make them magically disappear, I feel a sense of release when I silently rest my hands on the earth or a tree and imagine the sinews and roots taking the anguish deep into the ground and recycling it into compost.
Something similar happens when spring approaches. The sowing season rides in on its coat-tails, undeterred by the icy layer of winter’s last breath. Sprinklings of pollen mix with the ice crystals of lingering frosts, and another type of transformation is afoot.
Tilth: prepared soil surface for planting or growing.1 The more uncertain the world feels the more I want to plunge my hands into the earth to feel something life-giving. We grow a lot of vegetables at home, and whenever I prepare the beds and pots ready to sow seeds, I think of the soil breaking down my troubles and turning them into nutrients that might help something grow.
As an extension of that, the following ritual is a symbolic practice for when everything feels too much and you need something to disperse your thoughts and bolster your spirit at the same time. It’s also a practice of hope and patience. It’s not just about physically growing a plant, it’s cultivating a nurturing space within. To push a seed into the earth is to hope. To care for the seeds within us—our desires and ideas—is an act of faith in ourselves. In life and in nature this has never felt more important.
For this ritual if you want something tangible, then plant a seed. But know that it isn’t necessary. It’s just as symbolic to feel the words, reading them silently and letting them sink in, to be received and held by a compassionate place within. There’s no success or failure, just a willingness to care for whatever seed you’d like to grow within you, or on your windowsill.
What you’ll need:
One or two seeds. Something easy to grow if you choose to plant, such as love-in-a-mist, cosmos or yarrow. But no need to buy seeds: if you have a tomato, you could take a seed or two from the inside and use it as your totem.
A small plant pot or an empty, cleaned out yoghurt pot with holes put in the bottom.
Soil
What seeds are you planning to plant? And what are the ideas that you’d like to grow? If you’re happy to share, I’d love to know!
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Royal Horticultural Society
What a lovely ritual you’ve created. Thank you Jo.