Sprouts and Seeds
A couple months ago, I began sprouting lentils. My friend had pulled a crisp jar from her fridge as she prepared us lunch one day, miming how to cultivate them from dried legume to living beings. After a few tries I was hooked on these tangled bunches of kindly grown protein.
Sprouts take three to four days to grow. As I shared this new habit with friends, I was reminded of language I’d heard across the last three years. I see you’re planting a lot of seeds. It’s hard work. It will take time for them to grow. These reflections have proven true.
In the last few weeks, a few friends and mentors observed further: the seeds you were sowing years ago have begun to sprout. I blinked to see how this is also true. I’d like to share a few examples of what that progress looks like right now.
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A year ago this week, I completed the first draft of a novel, a seed that fermented across my thirties, and then suddenly spouted over 7 weeks last year.
Since January I’ve been sending inquiries to literary agents; in late summer, I heard from one in particular who understood completely what I had written. No matter how much I polished and pruned my sentences across the months, finding an agent depended on counsel from community, feats of patience, and finding pockets of confidence amidst ongoing rejection. I asked for help, I accepted help, and I’ve been offering help to writers going through it.
A neighbor introduced me to a friend who does similar work to mine. When we met for coffee in summer, I described some partnerships that were developing from cold pitches that I’d sent to a few companies I was eager to collaborate with. My neighbor’s friend was astonished; she had never tried this route.
That people write back (not always, but sometimes) is a lesson I learned from being a writer and reader, sending notes of appreciation to some of my favorite authors over the years. (The first instance I remember was a response from Lois Lowery when I was a child; later, I recall the joy of receiving notes from David Berman, Mary Ruefle, Claudia Rankine, C.D. Wright.)
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Suddenly, the Culture Forms docket is full. Every day I fine-tune the balance between writing, finding people with whom to stay in conversation, and facilitating; between being a family member, a friend, and a person who needs time alone to get work done; between taking extreme care and practicing the art of improvisation. Several exciting contracts are approaching execution this fall; my agent and I are off to sell a novel; I’m working on three other books; I’m reading voraciously again.
Over the Jewish High Holidays, two sermons stuck me to my core; they have everything to do with the seeds we choose to plant and nurture.
They exist beyond belief (save for a belief in one’s self and one’s community).
One is about what to do when we get stuck and involves one of the most important syllables of work/life: asking for help.
The other is about how to live right now, as we grow older and then old, how to resist pretending that life will begin around some arbitrary corner, after some forthcoming accomplishment.
Planting seeds—whether by learning, in community, or through reflection—ensures that our life won’t always look precisely as it does right now.
No matter your relationship to change, I invite you to plant something new this fall—or look up how to grow sprouts—and see what might appear some future season.