JOY ALONG THE WAY: INVISIBLE BLUEPRINTS FOUND IN EVERY SEED

'Tis the season of seeds; sowing of them, that is. I stand before a tall, cylindrical, revolving seed stand and become enraptured, enchanted, entranced. My grocery shopping cart is stilled as I gaze at the hundreds of colorful little seed packages. The old affirmation that seeds are the stuff of new beginnings rises to the top of my mind. Hold a handful of the little brown things and you have the visual manifestation of hope and faith.

Man has become so clever with microchips, DNA, genetic codes and engineering, but one thing eludes him, the secret inside the seed. He cannot apply reason as in some laboratory experiment to learn what makes the seed tick. He must take is on faith that somewhere inside the seed in a blueprint of what it will become if sowed in soil and given water and sunshine. By faith he knows that a seed of corn will produce a stalk of corn, not celery or cocklebur.

As I stand before the tall seed stand display, I become oblivious of other shopping carts moving around me. Through some practiced, extra sensory vision, bordering on hypnosis. I see various flowers and vegetables sprouting from the packages. Look at that sunflower bursting out of its paper confinement and asserting itself to be the biggest flower thereabouts! Down below, a shower of Thumbulina zinnias break their barriers and bloom like some colorful showers from the Pleiades. "How about this?" they seem to say to the sunflower. The humble moss rose emerges as if to remind the show-offs that they are flowers, too, when the sun shines.

The race is on. The stand becomes a live, burgeoning Tower of Babbling Flowers. There is the parade of white and yellow daisies on the left, bright streaks of red salvia on the right. In between emerges the orange nasturtium, blue larkspur, purple petunia and hundreds of other flowers. The morning-glories send out their vines and tendrils to twine in and around all the others as if to hold them up. From the other side of the revolving cylindrical stand come the pole bean and cucumber vines to assist the morning-glories' effort as well as supporting their own kind -- the lettuce, beets, turnips. Red radishes pop out like big periods as if to separate the conglomeration into some readable sentences. Little knobby cucumbers droop. They appear to be green hand grenades and the cantaloupes throw their rough-hided bodies over them to suppress an explosion.

I can see the stand enlarging, seed package by seed package. It seems to be taking up more and more space. Will I need to move back? It is a veritable gypsy float.

Finally another's cart bumps into the seed stand and turns it again into a myriad of little paper seed packages. I look at the floor as if to see smashed peas, watermelon rinds, crushed marigolds, flattened rutabagas. The floor is clean. The entrancement is over. But there before me are still the seeds in their paper walls, each one hugging its little secret, put there by the Creator who has drawn invisible blueprints and timing devices for the seed to sprout, the leaf to uncurl, the flower or fruit to form, come full circle to form the seed again, always and always with this secret inside, wrapped in humble brown coverings.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.