FIRE, SEEDS AND THAT WORD 'LIFE'

 

Fire is beautiful. Have you ever just sat and watched the flames - so many colours and shapes and always changing. The warmth of a fire on a cold night in the bush, the hiss and crackle of the burning wood and the need to constantly tend it carefully to make it right for cooking are all things that fill up your senses when it gets dark, if you are camping. I love cooking on a fire; it is all of my requirements rolled into one activity - full of surprises, requires constant alertness, it is creative, and totally fulfilling at the end. Everything cooked on a fire tastes good because of all the effort that has gone into it and the satisfaction of having produced it at the end of a hard day's walking.

The total simplicity of dealing with a fire is tightly linked to seedsaving! It is that whole connection to the earth thing that I am always going on about. The older I become the deeper that gets until, I guess, one day I will be a part of the earth again. The circle of life and death, just like a seed. There is a pyramid of understanding, I think, about this whole food-growing movement. It can begin anywhere, maybe even at the very top with a showy display of herbs in beautiful pots, gracing a front door step, which are never actually eaten. It then seems to lure people along, step by step, until they find a little niche of satisfaction, somewhere inside themselves.

Eventually, I see these people proud to have picked something and actually eaten it. Hooked! It goes on from there, usually, to something that comes within a hair's breadth of grasping the why's and wherefores of nature. To go another step and start saving seeds and sowing them for other than your own personal gain requires a little input from outside and I hope our seedsavers group and this stuff I and others write on this blog might be the catalyst for at least one person, somewhere, to make the connection between the seed saving and the personal food production, on the one hand, and sustaining the wealth of resources of life on earth and, actually, the civilisation of the human race too. Pretty heavy stuff but please excuse me for my passions!  

 

 

Here are some things that were flowering this weekend at Deep Creek Conservation Park, about an hour and a half's drive south of Adelaide. They are all part of the seed producing process that ensures the continuation of that thing we on Earth call 'life' and which appears to be quite elusive on other land masses in our universe. It is so special, so unique to here on Earth. Take that thought with you into the rest of your life and please, take care of the earth in every way you can.