Six Arrows Farm: A Six Arrows Farm Update

Much as I love poetry, I am no poet. There are times when I hear the words falling as distant lilting music on my mind's ear, but putting them down on paper with clarity is a discipline of the English language I have yet to master. I have resorted often to the garbled or "un-translated" verse in spite of the lack of rhyme since poetry often makes very nice prose. A true poet would probably accuse me of a negligent approach to communication...and they would be correct in their assessment. There are in fact enough instances when I feel the need for skill in poetry that I now believe the time is not far distant when I will buckle down and learn the theory.

This is a time when I wish poetry were at my finger tips. How do you write about the germination and emergence of seedlings with common everyday prose? The growth that results in the birth of a new plant is nothing short of miraculous. It simply gets swallowed up and overwhelmed by the crushingly profound terms...germination...emergence. Perhaps my quandary is a language issue. These words are rich in meaning, they just don’t sound that way. Take French for example. Even a conversation about a common fence post in French sounds gracious and refined...unless, perhaps, you speak French? In any case, the world of small plants has crept quickly and silently right into our living-room, so I felt I should attempt to address it.

There is something very brave and vulnerable about a new seedling. Small forests of thyme and oregano, sage and chives are thriving in a world of warmth and light not removed from the blustering cold by more than a few inches of air and glass. Twisting and cracking the humble dingy husks that were their only safety, in haste these germs of flourishing growth reach up and delve down in all sorts of fantastic shapes. No one tells them what to do or how to do it; but when moisture softens their shell, they reach blindly but un-erringly for that life-giving and yet deadly light penetrating their darkness. Without proper moisture light is death to a sprout. Yet a plant will never cease from its earliest moments to lift up its face and arms to the light. In awe-inspiring variety, each plant flourishes best in its own unique habitat of light and wet. And there is no plant which receives life and health from the sun and rain that will ever cease to bear good fruit as long as it lives because it is the joy of a healthy plant to grow and flourish and ripen. The only way a plant with light and water will not bear fruit is if the earth no longer yields nutrients…dead earth.

One of the changes a new seedling effects in the first weeks of growth is the loss of the first leaves, “cotyledons,” as it pours all its life into the “true leaves.” The “seed leaves” wither away and die, but the plant neither stunts nor wilts in growth, but drops the things of the past by the wayside to reach new heights.

I know of no more profound work in a creation filled with wonders. The wisest man in the world directed us:

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” ~Proverbs 6:6-8

Solomon, the wisest of men, understood the simple yet weighty significance of every creation. Nature shouts praise to the Creator in the quiet diligence of the ant and the silent audacity of a plant, daring heat and flood, cold and wind, death and time to stop it from doing what it was created to do.

“…And buds of rarest green began to peer,
As if impatient for a warmer sun…”

~Hartley Coleridge

“Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; …Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth? "Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass?"

~God in Job 38:12 & 22-27

By the way, the most mindful and tender of greenhouse-keepers, among many other things, just turned 21!