Seeds of Renewal

Life wants to live

A tree trunk with textured dark bark surrounded by green clover and yellow flowers in a garden or forest setting.
Charred tree root in a forest with green plants and small yellow flowers.

“When you can fully become a flower, you will know … because sooner than you think hummingbirds will begin to flock and buzz around you, fighting to be first to drink the nectar of your grief flower right off your chest.

Then you must weep for the wonder of the joy at seeing your losses become beauty through grief that hummingbirds can drink as something sweet. Or maybe turn your hard angry head into moss and watch the orioles begin to steal your hair for nests. Let them —you are misusing your head anyway and after all the birds are metabolizing your losses through the praise that is the animal itself, by turning all your grief into a state of wonder. You are a person who can live if you can call and feed the animals to drink the beauty you've become from grief.”

— Martin Prechtel

A person with dirty hands touching the bark of a tree that resembles a human face.
A woman kneeling on the ground outdoors, examining or digging near a small, charred tree and a bone on the dirt ground, with a landscape of hills and leafless trees in the background.
A burnt, leafless tree on a hillside with green rolling hills and cloudy sky in the background.

What if grief doesn’t belong to you but to the earth? What if the emotional pain you wish you could forget beneath buried grounds is actually the fertile seed in an ecological process that ensures the prosperous continuation of life? 

A leafless tree standing on a green hillside with yellow flowers, under an overcast sky.
A bare tree on a green hillside with smaller bushes and plants, under an overcast sky.