SEEDS OF THE UNKNOWN
THE VISUAL HEALING
LIBRARY
VOLUME ELEVEN
For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction...
Cynthia Occelli
SEEDS OF THE UNKNOWN
Over the years I have been working with Visual Medicine™ and the energies of Creation I have received hundreds of paintings that have carried an imprint of a seed.
In the vast mysteriousness of the living world seeds can look like "everything" from the tiniest speck - to the seed of the Coco de Mer (Lodoicea maldivica) - the largest seed in the world weighing a staggering 18 kgs (40lbs).
It takes around six to seven years for the seed to germinate and another 25-30 years before the tree is mature enough to produce its own fruit. The Coco de Mer is known for its exceptional lifespan often living for several hundred years.
Above: Seed of The Coco de Mer - photo: Sharon Bonne
How can we possibly imagine that a giant oak tree can grow from a seed so intricately sculpted as a tiny acorn?
The most famous oak tree in Kew Gardens is the Turner's Oak (Quercus Turneri), planted in 1798 and celebrated for surviving the 1987 Great Storm which uprooted it and then replanted itself which allowed the roots to have more room and more oxygen. Learning from this "uprooting" has revolutionised how old trees are cared for all over the world.
Seeds can be as diaphanous as a dandelion which disperse as thin strands of mimetic fibre light enough to be carried on the breath of the wind.
Or the tiny cones of the Lebanon Cedar that look almost microscopic next to these towering tree giants of heartbreakingly slow growth. Part of the Lebanon Cedar's tiny land coverage compared with other trees of the giant pine family is due to their small often-trampled seed cones.
The images above and below are taken from the frontispiece of the magnificent book Seeds: Time Capsules of Life by Rob Kesseler and Wolfgang Stuppy.
Seeds quite literally hold the DNA of life on this planet. Each one is a living archive, carrying evolutionary memory across billions of years, continents and multiple climates.
Below are seed capsules from Nymphoides peltata.
An architecture of becoming so intricate and otherworldly that it is difficult to believe they arise from the dark intelligence of the soil.
Further below are seeds from Darlingtonia californica, Goodenia rosia, Nigella damascena, and Scutellaria orientalis.
Each offers a glimpse into the astonishing creativity of life -forms that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, terrestrial and cosmic.
Seeds are not small beginnings.
They are vast compressions of time
folded into matter,
memory folded into form,
future folded into the possibility of becoming.
I feel I am in a chrysalis,
a seed pod,
being dissolved,
into raw imaginal cells
with only a longing for bright, golden dreams....
which like a moth to a flame
I am cautious to reveal
even to myself
in case I burn the edges of my not-yet wings.
- Lizzie Foster-Bollons
Seeds hold a living archive of our planetary continuity and the evolving potential of the patterns of life itself.
THE SEED
THE BEGINNING, THE ORIGIN, THE PEARL
Beginnings come in many forms. They are not always a beautiful seed placed intentionally in nourishing soil.
Origin stories (like any birth story) are complex, surprising, multilayered and usually reveal a central image or detail that represents the fully formed being. simply stated, the end is present in the beginning; or the entire oak tree resides within the acorn.
Whether you follow this imaginal theory or not, know that when this card appears, there is potent generative energy all around. It stirs your very insides and usually results in an antsy, impatient feeling.
Pay particular attention to what agitates you, as it is a sure sign of growth to come. You are bumping up against a growth edge. It is from the grit that the pearl eventually comes to be.
From: The Wild Unknown Archetype Oracle cards - by Kim Krans
What does the seed inside you need in order to crack open, grow and thrive to become its truest form?
Every seed holds an unknown.
Not only the future plant, but entire imaginal worlds folded into its form - seeds of ideas, seeds of vast ecologies, seeds of beings not yet visible.
In this time of meta-crisis, seeds offer an instruction - a seed never grows as we expect. It follows a hidden design, one that surprises, reshapes, and reveals coherence only in time.
Look for seeds in everyone and everywhere. In nature, in images, in fleeting intuitions and half-formed thoughts. What appears small or dormant may be carrying an entire ecosystem within it.
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