Seed to Dust Quotes

“This life is beautiful, but there is no such beauty in eternity; its glory is only because it ends.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“In my imagination, this life has been a path with many, many forks, each one a choice to be made. Each unchosen route fading from view as it became the past, its destination unknowable. No destination is really known until you arrive, and then it becomes merely a point along the way - a vague place rarely planned for, simply the start of another adventure. The only thing to do is be happy with the outcome, whatever it is. The path leads to the end, as all paths do. I've had some rocky paths and dead ends, and decisions that led to disaster, and others that led to love and passion and poetry, to excitement and adventure. All I can do is embrace them all and move on. People sometimes get frozen and unable to decide which path to take; others instantly regret their choices, because their dreamlike fantasies about the unchosen path were far brighter in their minds than the reality and effort of their chosen one. What could have been has never been, and never will be. This is the Tree of Life where each branch grows and bears fruit and, ultimately, ends in a bud. There are no rules, and nothing planned by humans is ever planned that way again. The way is vague and unknowable.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“Love is simple: just pay attention, put the effort in, kill your ego.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“We each have a space that fits us, all our darks and lights; and when we leave, the space lasts for a while, then slowly closes up, changing shape as it does, and we are mostly forgotten. I have forgotten most of my own life - why should somebody else remember it? I have found a purpose in life, and it is to bloom, wander around, have a bite to eat. Nothing of any value lasts for ever.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“When a song is ended, it leaves nothing but a feeling in those who heard it until that feeling, slowly moving backwards in time, collapses under pressure from more recent feelings and is replaced. Events become memories, unreliable stories, fade away at the ends. Unconnected and distinct from the day's experience, they become one of the millions of strata that make us who we are. We are the sum of all our experiences. We are waves on the ocean, interacting with and affected by all the other waves that move and die and are washed up on the shore. We are each a breath, a song, a flower. We are time itself, and mine has been long and I've collected many disconnected layers.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“A Sikh told me once that everyone was a flower in the Lord God's garden - all the individuals, the colours and races, tribes and religions; it was an idea that I fell in love with, and kept coming back to over the years, and eventually I chose to be a flower. I don't believe in any kind of God; if there is such a beast, he has horns and hooves and plays the pipes and doesn't live in the sky, for us to look up to and worship, but underground, and pushes all the wonderful things out of the soil for us to admire, pushes us out into the world, then takes us back again to join the earth. A creator that gives us passion and music and lust: that's my kind of deity, should I ever need one.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“Swann’s Way Proust says, ‘Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“here in the present
distracted by the future
when I plant spring bulbs.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“whatever you build
nature burns it down again
beginning is end”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“A broken cloud of small birds can't make up its mind which tree to land in. First they fly to one, then the other, then back again. Like me, they are vagrant, having no focus. And the world is new again, and I feel clean and happy that nearly every morning for the last sixty-odd years I have popped into the world for a while and at the end of the day popped out again, and eventually the day will come when my song will end and that is all fine. I don't need to do anything, I don't need to be Sisyphus rolling his stone. I can be happy, just watching and listening and tasting the air without thinking, without doing. My beard is white, through sun or years; my head as smooth as a river stone. My autumn has come and I'm ripening - how sweet that is! How sweet a flower I'll try to be.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“For a few days, uncertain about what I should do next, I go for walks and watch television. The walking is good, but the television leaves me feeling hopeless and worthless. The vile psychopaths it wants me to enjoy cannot hold me in their spell. I can't bear to absorb those indelible images and pollute myself with hatred and violence. What doesn't depress me makes me feel like the cornered victim of a wealthy bore with their holiday movies, who sucks the vitality out of me. I pull the plug and take to my bed to read, cocooned again in poetry and wondering about a rebirth.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story