Planting Seeds.

Last week, I read from Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening. The passage talks about how burying and planting are essentially the same.

                 The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. 
There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the things put to rest, whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing – becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold.
The full passage is followed by a practice, which gave me goosebumps. Mark offers that you:

• Try to identify one aspect of your way in the world that has outlived its usefulness
• Try to understand why you are still wearing it.
• On loose paper, journal what this outlived aspect is and why you are still wearing it.
• Take the paper and symbolically bury it somewhere special, giving thanks for how this outlived way has helped you to this point in your path.
• Be kind to the new space that burying this has opened in you.
• Water it and keep it in the light.

It is the last bullet point that gets me: "Water it and keep it in the light", for it is fodder for the next way of being. I love the idea of burying in this way in order that it may come to be something new, and watering it, giving it light rather than hiding, stuffing, or pretending it didn't happen.

What in your world is in need of planting?