Seeds of Hope, Seeds of Healing

"Do you even know how to grow a garden anyway? Do you even know how to grow a garden anyway?" The words echoed in my mind, sweeping over me again and again like ice-cold ocean waves. I moaned, but couldn't escape the taunting echo that grew louder each time instead of softer. Then the sound of gunshots ricocheted across my memory and I woke.

I sat straight up in my sleeping bag, breathing hard and bathed in a cold sweat. As I came back to reality, I glanced at the sleeping forms of my mom and my siblings, grateful that I hadn't woken everyone up this time.

I slept late and the smells of wood smoke and breakfast already filled the pre-dawn darkness. When I crawled out of the tent my mom gave me a warm bowl of boiled acorn soup and for once, a smile. "Yasha, it wasn't your fault," she said gently. "Don't you ever let yourself believe that.

I quickly tipped up my soup bowl to hide my face. It was the most direct attempt she had made yet to talk about what happened, and I was grateful for the darkness which shielded me a little from her eyes. For so long her eyes had been blank and vacant, but over the last few weeks the light behind them had steadily grown. "I know," I answered quickly. "But I'm late, I gotta go to work."

As I rushed off, I tried to make sense of the emotional soup sloshing around inside me. During those first homeless weeks of walking from city to city, I was too numb to do anything but put one foot in front of the other and help find the next meal for my family. Then the pain frozen in my heart had been ripped out and burned into anger when Mom sold the broccoli seeds.

The thought brought heat to my cheeks even now and I realized I was pounding my feet into the ground with each step. How could she? Those seeds were all I had left - taking them felt like a betrayal. But what else could she do to feed us? How could I be angry at her when I was the one who… That thought hurt too much to look at. All I knew was that I couldn't handle talking with her, and I didn't know how I was ever going to forgive my mom or myself.

"Good morning Yasha!"

I lifted my eyes to see the face of my coworker Mira framed by the rising sun. She looked straight into my face as if she were reading me like a book and I braced my heart for whatever was coming next.

When we first met over a month ago, Mira had looked at me like that and asked if I was too young to have ever seen a dandelion. I told her I had seen dandelions before and she explained that her very first thought when she saw me was that I was like a brave dandelion seed blown by the wind but that now I could rest for a while.

My eyes were still too numb then to fill with tears but my heart had stirred to the memory of my grandma blowing dandelion seed blooms and telling me that the real reason she grew them wasn't for the roots but because of how much she loved the brave little tufts that flew off into the wind, full of hope that somehow they might reach a better world.

And Mira had been right, my mom had found a job the very next day and we were finally able to settle down in one place. I had asked her many times if she was psychic, but she always said it wasn't like that. She told me sometimes she would get images or messages for people. Once, I asked where the messages came from and she whispered, "Love." She had breathed the word with hushed awe, as if love were some benevolent entity that could hear every word she spoke and speak back to her. Maybe she was crazy, but every "message" she had given me so far had been spot on.

"What is it?" I asked as we walked to work, "I can tell you have some sort of 'love message' you want to tell me."

"Well, this one is about forgiveness - does that make any sense?" I sucked in a breath and nodded so she continued.

"Just that forgiveness is about debts that can't be paid. Sometimes someone owes us a debt, or maybe we owe someone a debt through our decisions or mistakes. If we carry it around, it becomes a burden that crushes us. But we always have the option to take it off, turn around and look the debt full in the face. We can acknowledge the truth of what was done. Once we do that, then Unconditional Love can come in and pay the debt. That's what forgiveness means - letting love pay the unpayable debt. And when forgiveness gets planted in our heart, it becomes the seed of healing that sets us free." She put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "That's all I heard for you, I hope it helps."

"Thanks," I said and managed a weak smile. "We should probably start our shift now."

I couldn't focus during work. When the shift finally ended, I wrestled with the weight of memory all the way home in the fading light.

I saw our beautiful house, the very house Grandma had grown up in. It was where she had planted her first tiny garden in an enormous backyard when she was 17. I remembered her laugh as she told me her parents expected her to give up the first time she got dirt under her manicured fingernails. But she had known the earth was growing sick and her little garden made her feel like she was doing something to help.

I remembered kneeling beside her in the garden while she taught me how to pollinate and told the story of the first summer she learned to hand pollinate after the bees disappeared. I remembered tears running down her cheeks as she told me about the year when my dad was a little boy and it didn't rain for weeks and they lost the whole garden and barely made it through that winter. I remembered the anger in my dad's eyes as he told me about the violence he witnessed as a teenager in the years of the Great Collapse.

I remembered the winter I was 8 years old and saw the frozen face of a little kid who had died on the side of the road and realized just how lucky I really was. It was the first time I understood that the only difference between me and the ones who never made it to the next spring was that I had a big house and a dad who sold heirloom seeds to the rich who could afford to grow fields surrounded by electric fences and pay laborers to hand pollinate their vegetables.

When I got home, my mom and siblings weren't back yet, so I rummaged through the tent and finally found my grandma's locket hidden at the bottom of my mom's sleeping bag. I cradled it in my palm, a large, silver, heart-shaped locket. I closed my fingers around it in a fist and thought about what Mira had said about facing debts.

Resolutely, I turned and stared straight into the memory that had chased me in my dreams these past few months since it happened. I heard again the loud, angry voices outside my window. I saw my grandma hastily stuffing our backpacks with supplies and then fastening her locket around my neck. I remembered staggering after her and my sister into the cold night air where my mom was screaming and my little brother was staring with big, frightened eyes as one of the men held a gun to his head.

I allowed the icy waves of the memory to wash over me. I looked into the last clear picture I had of my dad's face as he calmed my mom and lifted the strap of the tent bag onto her shoulder. I remembered his strong voice as he told the men to let his son go and that we were leaving now with no trouble. I remembered how my brain was trying to make sense of what was happening as they turned us out of our own home and rummaged through our backpacks to make sure none of our own belongings were something they wanted to take.

Why? Why couldn't I have just shut my mouth, put my head down, and walked away with the rest of my family? A sob broke from my throat, but I forced myself back into the memory, forced myself to look into my own face as the smart-alec words spilled out of my teenager mouth. "Do you even know how to grow a garden anyway?"

"Girl's got a point," one of the men had said. "Maybe we'll just keep the old one to do the work for us." The memory turned to slow motion as they roughly shoved my grandma to her knees, as my dad rushed forward to defend his mother, as my mom grabbed my hand and started running, as the gunshots echoed, as I turned, screaming, and caught one last glimpse of my dad and grandma crumpled over the damp garden soil.

There, I had done it. I had looked straight into the face of the debt I owed. I was unlovable and unforgivable. It was my fault my dad and my grandma were dead. That was an unpayable debt. How could love save me from something so big?

Mom found me sobbing uncontrollably and took me into her arms. I wailed and heaved out my grief and pain in deep, convulsive sobs. I felt her tears splashing down over my face and mixing with mine. But after the waves of pain drained off, a new spring of anger bubbled up inside me.

"How could you just sell them?!" I yelled at her through my tears. "Grandma gave the locket to me!" My voice choked as I remembered how my mom, after selling all the other seeds Grandma had hidden in various pockets of our backpacks, had taken the locket filled with tiny broccoli seeds off my neck one night while I slept. I knew I wasn't being fair. I knew she was just trying to survive, but right now I didn't care.

I threw the locket at her chest - one hard heart aimed at another. And I wanted her to get mad, to yell at me that if I had just kept my mouth shut we all would have been ok. I wanted her to punish me as I was punishing her. But she didn't. She just held me and whispered, "I love you," over and over. And when the storm in my heart had passed, she put the locket into my hands. "Open it," she said softly.

I did, and found it overflowing with all kinds of seeds. "I didn't sell them all," she whispered. "I kept back a few of each kind. And after I sold the broccoli seeds, I filled the locket back up. These are the seeds for a new garden that we will plant together as a family someday soon."

She gently clasped the locket around my neck again. "Yasha, will you forgive me?" I touched the gold heart resting over my own and looked at her through my tears.

"I forgive you," I whispered. And I knew I was speaking those words to my own heart as well. I was ready to let Love pay my debt and plant new seeds of healing to set me free.