SS-Ep1
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[00:00:00] 

Elizabeth: Welcome to Starting Seeds, a podcast about hobbyist gardeners, but more than that, about literal grounding, what can we learn with our hands in the dirt? What does it tell us about ourselves and the world around us? Starting Seeds is based in the thought that as humans, we turn to nature for comfort, for creativity, for inspiration.

And in that, in the lessons we learn tending a garden or caring for plants or being in nature, spill over into our personal, professional, and private lives.

Modern thought leaders want you to believe that they have a silver bullet for you, a quick way to fix your relationships, your business, that hole in your heart. but Starting Seeds is built on the idea that there is a fire, there's a magic in you, we're all evolving. We're all growing. [00:01:00] Like, uh, the old parable suggests like mustard seeds. So what connects us and what can we learn from each other? I'm talking about: what lessons has a stay-at-home mother learned? What lessons has a day laborer learned?

What lessons has an artist who has been at the kiln for 80 years learned what, has a business professional, who's started up several companies and is, is starting and selling another one. What have they learned while in the garden? I think that these are lessons that belong to all of us. They're universal.

They don't belong in a book. They don't belong on some talk track. I think they belong in the stories and the space between us. And so I hope that as we have friends that come on, as we learn about what they're doing in their lives and what they've experienced, that we can take these stories and we can take these lessons and we can put our hands in the dirt and plant them:

into something new, into a world [00:02:00] that we imagine, that we want to exist. 

I am Elizabeth. I will be your emcee through our whole experiment here. I was telling a few friends about what I wanted to do with starting seed, and I figured that might be a good first. Post? Blog? Video? Um, no, my, my, my audio's gonna be weird. Editing's gonna be choppy, but ultimately let's start with our story. 

Elizabeth: In fall of 2020, my grandmother died. It was something that hit me very hard specifically because I didn't have a great relationship with her.

I, my, my mother, my grandmother, it was a broken family from the beginning. Um, Rose, my grandmother was a, a product of war. She came from Vietnam. She, had her own traumas associated with growing up poor, or growing up with addiction or however you wanna slice it, she was a complicated, complex woman and.

This complicated, my grief, um, I, I didn't [00:03:00] know the woman, I wasn't gonna go to her funeral. And so. I had to figure out how to deal with my own grief. And, uh, at that same time, that year I had planted, um, what I've called, um, uh, my front yarden.

Elizabeth: front yarden, which is a portmanteau of, uh, front yard, and garden, front yarden. 

I always felt like I just didn't have the right space or the right lighting or whatever. And it just, everything lined up for me to have the space. And, um, so I planted a garden that year and I planted watermelons. I'd never been able to grow watermelon. And so I was very excited about growing watermelon. And I don't know if you know this about watermelon, um, but it's one of the things we may learn throughout our time together is, um, when you are planting produce, you want to make sure that you give, um, the best produce the best opportunity for itself.

And so specifically with something like watermelon, you only wanna have two or three fruit per vine. And with these watermelon. I [00:04:00] had, maybe I had four plants I'd over planted a thing that I'm learning, but, um, I had eight vines coming off those plants and I had well over 20 watermelon growing on those vines. And so the timing lined up that in the fall, uh, in the late summer, I am cleaning up these watermelon.

And I'm having to prune them. I'm having to take and decide with each little watermelon baby on the vine, which ones are going to produce for me, which ones have enough time, uh, which ones have enough promise. 

And I was taking off all of these watermelons and smashing them on the sidewalk so that I could put their remains in my compost to make more goodness for other plants. And [00:05:00] I remember so clearly the smell of the watermelon, you know, it's creamy, white. Uh, it was not anywhere near ripe. They're just small little watermelons when smashing on the sidewalk to break them up so that they can digest in the compost more quickly. And it felt so strongly that I'm grieving my grandmother, who I don't have a relationship with. And as, I mean, as I grew up, I remember being so jealous of other people who had relationships with their grandparents. Like I had friends who would say, yeah, I'm gonna go make cookies with my grandmother, or I'm gonna go spend the weekend with my grandparents.

And that's not something that I ever got to experience with Rose. I did have other grandparents that were very good to me, but there's something about knowing that you're disconnected from a part of you, that was not your fault. It's just a product of the world around you. It's not your fault those dreams can't be fulfilled.

It just wasn't the right time or place. It wasn't the [00:06:00] experience for you. So I'm smashing these watermelons and I'm putting them away and I'm kind of realizing as I'm doing it, that each of these watermelons is kind of like an unrealized dream, an unrealized experience I could have had with my grandmother, an unrealized relationship and connection.

But as I was smashing them and putting them in the compost, it was not lost on me that I was taking what could have been and investing in what could be.

Elizabeth: As I pulled each of these watermelons up, I was angry. I was so. angry. How dare these plants put me in this position? I, I just wanted to grow something good. And I didn't realize that I was going to have to be responsible, uh, and take apart things that didn't need to [00:07:00] be there for the sake of the health of everything else.

Like how, how dare they, and I think that that's a really apt metaphor for the really complicated grief that I was experiencing and helped me get through it. In fact, if I didn't tear apart the garden that year intentionally pulling apart the watermelons, staking, all of the tomatoes.

If I didn't have that to focus on, I don't think I would be able to have processed my grief in quite the same way. In fact, if I. If I didn't have the watermelons to tear apart and to help create a tangible sense of hope. I, I don't think I would've gotten over or gotten through my grief with as much peace as I found.

In the months and years that followed, I have grown. I, um, have dealt with my grief in various ways. I've, uh, [00:08:00] I immediately went and bought a piece of Jade that I wear next to my heart regularly to remember my Vietnamese heritage. I've been learning Vietnamese.

I've been celebrating the lunar new year. And in each of those things, I took the grief and I've turned it into something beautiful. I've made friendships with Vietnamese people. I've connected with others in ways that. If I had not come to peace with the pain that I'd had, 

I wouldn't be connected to these people. So

the story here is we often look at gardens and we think of what we can create. We think of new life. We think of good things. But when I see a garden often now I think of grief. I think of pain that I've dealt with. I think of divorce. I think of loss, uh, not just loss of, [00:09:00] um, uh, family, but also loss of friendship, loss of, um, jobs.

I think of, I think of the hard decisions that I've had to make when something doesn't suit me and I have to decide, is this plant done? Is it time? And so I, I started thinking that maybe. maybe in the garden, in the mud, there are lessons that belong to all of us, that it doesn't matter who you are, what you do.

If you're a business professional, if you're a mother, if you're a day laborer, there are lessons in the garden that spill over into the rest of our life in that is what I want to showcase here on Starting Seeds.

I'll never have a relationship with my grandmother. She's gone. The time is gone for that, but I can take [00:10:00] what I've learned. I can take what I've experienced. I can take the pain of that and use it as fodder to create a better world. I've got watermelons growing again this year. They volunteered out of my compost, meaning I didn't plant them.

I didn't choose to have watermelon. They just decided to grow. And I just think that is a really lovely metaphor for what we have to experience in life. And I hope that as you come along with me and we have a cup of something warm on Sunday mornings, that the lessons that my friends share will be meaningful to you and that you can take them and invest them in your lives.

That that connection itself is what helps us create a new and better world. So thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me as I talk [00:11:00] about my garden, as I talk to my friends who I love as I talk to you, and I hope that as we get in the mud together, we, we stick our hands in the earth over and over again, that we'll be able to see not only what connects us,

but we can together plant the seeds for a world that we wanna live in. 

I'm Elizabeth Copeland, and I hope you'll join us on Starting Seeds.