Let it Grow

Plant this seed, she told me, in the harshest place in the world. And if it grows, I will love you.

So I took the seed, and far did I journey. To the highest mountain top, where the winds blew through the warmth of my down and the snows fell higher than my head. I burrowed deep, dug through layers of snow and fought sheets of ice until I met ground so long frozen that it had forgotten even the possibility of spring. There, I chipped away with my chisel and made a tiny hole, and in that hole I planted my seed.

But the ground was frozen and cold, and the seed did not grow.

So I returned to my love, hat in hand, weighed down by my failure.

But that was not the harshest place in the world, she said to me. Plant this seed in the harshest place in the world. And if it grows, I will love you.

So I took the seed and I journeyed into the deepest heart of the farthest jungle, past where the singing shapes danced round a fire of human bones, to where the insects bit with the voices of a thousand dead men, and the way back grew choked with vines before your footsteps had grown cold. There, weary and feverish with the weight of the air, I dipped my fingers into cool green mulch and planted the seed.

But the air was fetid and the ground too wet, and the seed did not grow.

So I returned to my love, hat in hand, weighed down by my failure.

But that was not the harshest place in the world, she said to me. Plant this seed in the harshest place in the world. And if it grows, I will love you.

So I took the seed and I ventured deep beneath the ground, squirming through tunnels so narrow I felt the whole Earth’s embrace, into caverns where a single whisper echoed and became an army. My fire guttered and my courage waned, and more than once I felt the pressure of the soil in which men suffocated and drowned in darkness, and I knew fear. But I felt the weight of the seed in my hand, so on I went, until the creatures I met had never heard of the sun no matter what tongue I spoke, and there by the light of a dying brand I scratched a hole in the earth’s dead bones, and planted the seed.

But the ground knew no promise of moisture, and the seed did not grow.

So I returned to my love, hat in hand, weighed down by my failure.

But that was not the harshest place in the world, she said to me. Plant this see din the harshest place in the world. And if it grows, I will love you.

So I took the seed and I left my love, and I walked the roads that all men walked, through balmy forests and cobbled streets. And I saw the length and breadth of the world, but nowhere did compare to the places I had been. So, finally, I came to a desert where the red sands stretched further than a camel could walk in a day, and I walked that length. I drank my fill of waterskins and walked again, past oases, til I came upon a tiny tree, thriving somehow in the midst of the endless thirst. And my eyes burned like the sun above and the mountains of sand, and the world became myself and this dread tree, that dared to live in a waste where no life could grow. And beside the tree I sat and wept, dry tears, the only tears a desert can see, and I feared I would never see my love again. So beneath the arms of that tree I planted the seed, that it might shelter from the harsh world as my love sheltered me, and so that it might die unalone.

And there, beneath that tiny, straggly tree, my seed did quicken. It did grow, and reach and stretch towards the sky, living off the sweetness of the tree’s deep roots, sheltered by the shade of those meager branches. And it did share its dew with me come morning, so the desert’s sharp-clawed thirst lost me in the spaces between its fingers. And I did pick a gentle blossom from the plant, and leave it and the barren, twisted tree alone beneath the sun. And I did journey to my love, and gift her with the blossom.

In the harshest place in the world, sheltered, the seed did grow, I told her. And so she took me in her arms, sheltered, in our own place in the world. Where there is love, she said, the world is never harsh.

Image by Kieran Macanulty.