During the 10 weeks of lock down Aberdeenshire Council has cut no grass. Not only that. They expressly prohibited residents from cutting council grass when some conscientious souls decided to do their civic duty keeping their own area tidy. The result has been an explosion of dandelions, turning central reservations, grass verges and larger areas of grass and woodland into symphonies of yellow.
Then for weeks the dandelions have been doing what they do; making dandelion clocks, producing millions of seeds equipped with the latest models of parachutes. I've always been fascinated by the sheer ubiquity of seeds on a dandelion plant, which can have half a dozen heads, with more where they came from, continuously sprouting for weeks. One of the first butterflies I spotted proved the wisdom of the advice given by conservation groups like Scottish Wildlife and RSPB and the National Trust for Scotland; leave the dandelions, they are early food for bees and butterflies when not much else is available yet. That by the way is also the rationale for Aberdeenshire Council stopping vigilante flymo raids on their grass – over the years they have reduced the number of cuts in a season. I'm OK with that.
Over the weeks of watching these plants, I began to think about the phenomenon of dandelions producing seeds in such abundance. These flowers, not weeds, ('weed' as a word is a social construction designed to discriminate against!) weren't always designated gardener's enemy number one. Dandelion tea, wine and herbal remedies go back to ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures. Apparently a beautiful pale yellow dye can be made from the petals, and a purple colour from the ribs of the leaves.
All that said, from the study window we look out on an area of communal Council grass which this year has been festooned in yellow followed by thousands of dandelion clocks each with up to 200 seeds. A breeze is enough to create a summer seed blizzard, and every one of those parachutes a potential plant for next year. A dandelion clock is a wonderful thing, such a concentration of potential, of life ready to disperse and renew the cycle of flower and seed, year on year – apparently they've been around for 30 million years, give or take a week or two.
In a world scared of the capacity of the Coronavirus to bridge, infect and reproduce, there was something strangely comforting about seeing seeds anchored on the flower, then letting go and floating in the air, and who knows where or whether they will find soil, and water, and the chance of life. The world goes on, and for now, so do we. Throughout this whole pandemic crisis I've been aware of a new and stronger sense of the importance of hope as the foundation for the kind of trust that will keep us living towards the future
Sometimes I try to reduce a thought to the disciplined form of Haiku. This is one of them, arising from looking closely at a dandelion clock:
Acknowledge beauty,
and pay attention to seeds
which hold the future.
All those seeds, ubiquitous, fragile, formed for flight, so well equipped to relocate elsewhere given a good breeze in the right direction, each seed arranged on the flower head with geometric precision; close up it's a glory of creative genius.
Every single seed fecund with possibility, durably delicate, awaiting the right combination of environment, circumstances and whatever else it is that determines if it will be bird food, humus or next year's dandelion.
But each of them is a seed, and I've learned all over again these past weeks to pay attention to seeds; they hold the future.
Jesus said something really sad about seeds: "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."
There is an inbuilt law of life that good futures don't just happen. They have to be built, and there is cost, sacrifice, and even the death of what is, so that what may be can emerge from the scaffolding of the present. Jesus was talking about his own death, and the life that would erupt from the dark hopelessness of a crucified and buried Messiah. "But if it die…….it bears much fruit."
The principle of self-giving love is the beating heart of the Christian gospel. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…" The seed must die or it will forever be safe, solitary, unfulfilled. Watching those gossamer light seeds caught up in currents of air they can never control, imagination reaches beyond the physical possibilities of germination and propagation of this or that seed. The life principle, the hope potential, the promise inherent in seeds blown into the future, is not about death, full stop. They are, every one of them, a reminder that the living God is the God of the living. The seed must die….it bears much fruit.
We are a resurrectional people, us Christians. We live in a world where death is not an irrevocable cosmic No to all that life is. Resurrection has happened, and the principle of life through death, demonstrated in Palestine, in a garden doubling as a cemetery, two thousand years ago, is now the pivot point of history, an event of eternally transformative power. And every believer who trusts to the immensity of that resurrectional power, who is drawn into the embrace of cruciform love, becomes one of millions of seeds, fertile with possibility to reproduce in kind, believing, loving trusting followers of Christ, the original and originating seed that died, and bears much fruit.
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