SEED

You go outside just as the sun is beginning to clear the borders of night, out into the morning and to the herbs, in this case oregano, which at mid-July is just beginning to form its tiny white flowers, now covered with dew, the best time to capture the magic of flavor that can be got from such a simple and unpretentious plant.

As you go along the herb bed and with a jeweler's eye select from among the tallest, healthiest and so most flavorful gems of oregano plants to cut for sun-drying now, letting the rest keep growing to cut later, in time letting some of the very best grow on to seed so that this richness will go on as we hope all good things will go on-- which is what seeds are for, after all, from our brief but deep perspective.

Doing this of a cool summer morning of what will be a hot day is in its own way a seed, a seed of experience, for as you go along accepting this green and fragrant gift of a year you are planting a seed in yourself that will quicken, grow and flower somewhere in the future-- and not only your own future, if you give to others.

As for yourself, when you later fashion a salad or a pizza, or create a Sauce Bolognese from scratch (for a few simple examples), such scratch will ideally include your own-grown tomatoes and onions, to which at last you add the savor of oregano, dried in the sun that shines even now on this endeavor, this seed for which you are the garden.