I’m looking at this heartwood, a cross section of a life, wondering at what might have happened here. What caused this tree to grow with a scar down her trunk? When did she get sick? When did they decide her time was up and she needed to be cut? 

She’s left seeds scattered around the forrest floor. You can see them if you look closely beneath the soft covering of moss, fern and rotting leaf litter.

I wonder at the bigger story her life is a part of. I wonder who came before her. I wonder at how the next chapter will unfold for the ones to come. 

Seeds may mature in as short a time as one year but for most species it is two years or longer. In most pines, the cones eventually re-open, allowing the seeds to fall out and be dispersed by the wind. Sometimes the cones remain closed and only open following the intense heat of a fire. The female cones of junipers and yews develop fruit-like features that attract animals who facilitate seed dispersal by consuming the fruits and defecating the seed in a new location.

Nature is wild. Unpredictable. Beautiful and also rugged. She commits herself fully to growth and to life—and the process is not often pretty or easy.

In nature, there are some seeds that cannot germinate unless they go through extreme freezing temps, scarification, or even fire. For some of us, the seed of our genius and the medicine we carry for the world must go through a challenge before we can unfold and begin to take root. Through the telling of our stories we get to discover what lies inside the seed and allow it to begin to emerge into the world and grow into the fullest expression possible of ourselves.

Each one of us carries seeds that contain a blueprint, an otherworldly intelligence determined towards growth. A memory. There is a record that gets passed down from one tree to the next, one life to the next. 

But how do we find the seeds held within our own stories? How do we allow them the opportunity to germinate?

Often times when we think about the stories that have shaped us, just like the scar that shaped that tree or the disease that led to her being cut, we find stories of challenge. Often the stories we house and store, particularly the ones that have had a handle over us, are stories of hardship. Stories of survival. Stories of trauma.

Trauma stories are what we carry around in our suitcase of identity as we walk through life. When we experience a trauma we often think that defines us in some way. We might, without even fully knowing it, consider ourselves damaged or less than. We can even set ourselves apart from everyone else thinking, you could never understand me or what I’ve been through. We can think we’re just part - not whole. And sometimes we feel victim to this experience.

Trauma memories themselves are often fragmented, not getting fully and cohesively stored in the brain. And this is brilliant because it would have been too much to take it all in and store it all together at the time. We have to fragment in order to maintain our safety and survival. 

But when we’re ready—when enough time has passed and the deepest, most vulnerable parts of us are actually ready to heal, to not let our traumas define us any longer—then we get to go back and tell our stories. I believe it’s actually imperative that we go back and tell our stories in order to release the seeds and allow them the opportunity to germinate.

In the telling of our story we get to reclaim ourselves. We reclaim our dignity and our autonomy. We reclaim our fragmented parts. We reclaim our love and compassion for our whole selves. And we reclaim a more whole sense of who we are—trauma, resilience, struggle, triumph, and all.

From this place we can begin to explore the meaning these stories hold for us. We enter into the layer of spiritual healing of our traumas. If spirit guides us throughout our lives, then these traumas we go through are also brought to us in some way by spirit, nature, the Universe. Not in any sort of way that is damning or repentance. But perhaps in a way that opens the space that allows the seeds the fertile ground from which to take root.

And so, for some of us the seed of our genius and the medicine we carry for the world must go through a challenge before we can unfold and begin to take root.

We are brought what we need in order to break open so that we can begin to unfold into who we came here to be.

Through the telling of our stories we get to discover what lies inside the seed and allow it to begin to emerge into the world. We receive exactly what we need from nature and spirit to grow into the fullest expression possible of ourselves.

I’m curious, can you sense the seeds carried within your story?