Column: Spirituality, "Stratified"

Photo by Gabrielle Wright

“Good morning, Douglas,” a bright voice says after I stop my phone’s alarm. “The time is 5 a.m. The weather today in Hannibal is cloudy. The temperature is 25, and the high will be 39. It will be rainy, and there’s a chance of snow. You have five events on your calendar; here are the first three. …” All those statements are generated by stock functions, but next up is one I customized myself. “The sun will rise today at 6:39 a.m. and set at 5:57 p.m.”

Thank you, Google Assistant. I like to know the days are getting sensibly longer. But it’s winter still, and I’m tired of it. I long for spring.

I live, for now, on the northernmost of the three hills that the old parts of Hannibal, Mo., are spread across. I rent a little house that started life in 1892 as a four-room worker’s cottage built around a central brick chimney. My landlords did a great job of updating it to current standards while keeping its character. I love it because out its east windows, I can see a wedge of the river, and the first light of day floods the whole house.

I wish it still had a wood stove, though. I wish I could get cozy and warm the way I do up next to a live fire.

My landlords Nicole and Bruno did a great job on the remodel, as I said, but out back, they left a pile of rubble, local fieldstone left over from the landscaping. I studied it last fall as I pondered an empty space beside the porch steps. That space wanted to be filled, I thought. So I texted Nicole, wintering in sunny Arizona. “Would you mind if I added a flower bed?” I asked. “Do anything with the landscaping you want,” she replied.

Thus on a November day, I stacked the stone in a low wall to fill in the square, dumped compost and topsoil into the well I’d made, and sowed the bed with black-eyed Susan and coneflower seeds I’d scavenged from down in town. Then waited for winter to fall.

They wouldn’t sprout if I kept them inside, warm and dry. Some seeds need a season of cold. Botanists call it “stratification.” Some need to swell with wetting and shrink with drying, stretch and stress their hard seed coats ‘til they crack. Or cut and wear them by rubbing up against sharp grains of sand in the soil. That’s “scarification.” Many native species won’t germinate without those processes.

I shiver to think I might be such a seed. I don’t want to be abraded by my environment. I am, I think, a little more open to getting soaked with change; water is the womb from which life is born. But God, I hate to be chilled; I dread to sleep cold.

If that is required for my quickening, though … sow me on the last warm day of autumn. Drown me, freeze me all winter long. Stratify me, scarify me. I’ll wait.

There shall surely be a spring.

The Reverend Doug Job does interim ministry for congregations in transition and keeps good memories and friends made while serving a church in Cape. He's currently serving in Hannibal, Mo. You may tell him how chill you are at revdarkwater@gmail.com.