It’s that time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when everyone is itching for rebirth. I am relatively new to seasons, a side effect of growing up a few degrees off of the equator, in Papua New Guinea. This is my third year of living in the cycles without a break and I am starting to understand the effects the cycles of seasons have on my own psyche. I woke up on the 28th of February thinking about seeds, and jumped online only to find I’d missed the gun. Seedy Saturday, Canada’s nationwide seed exchange, was happening as I read about it and would be packing up by the time I got the bus to the beautiful Van Dusen botanical gardens.So, I planted some of the seeds I had saved from last year, instead.

While living in the Catskills of New York, I had gotten in contact with The Hudson Valley Seed Library, which is a brilliant arrangement. In the spring you check out various types of seeds you would like to grow, and in the fall, you return the seeds you have borrowed. It’s not so different from a seed bank, and creates a community around seed saving and sharing.

March and April are months of rebirth and new beginnings around the globe. New Year festivals from Myanmar/Burma to Scotland were and still are traditionally celebrated in these months. The vernal equinox falls on the 20/21st of March. Night and day are equal. This day is also the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. It is celebrated as the day Jesus was conceived, announced by the archangel Gabriel to virgin Mary that the spirit of God was upon her. Nine months later, on Christmas day, Jesus was born.

Lady Day, the 25th of March, was a very ancient celebration of the Great Rite, or the holy marriage. In the legends of ancient Sumer, Inanna descends to the underworld on the vernal equinox, she passes through the seven gates, leaving an article of clothing at each gate. When she arrives she is naked and is killed by her sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, and hung on a hook. After three days and nights, Innana is rescued and sprinkled with life-giving water. On the 25th of March, Lady Day, Innana is resurrected. Traditionally, rituals re-inacted this rebirth/resurrection every year. Think of a seed, which is buried and put into the earth, as though dead. It is sprinkled with water and a few days later bursts out of the ground a new life, but also, in a sense, the old. The process of walking through the underworld has created something new.

These rituals are repeated every year all over the world. In various countries of South East Asia, welcoming the New Year is a 3-4 day long party in the streets, throwing water at everyone, symbolizing the washing away of the old to make room for the new. For Christians, there was initially much confusion around the official date of Easter, finally settling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal Equinox. This is a result of the Church wanting to avoid celebrating Easter on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Traditionally, the full moon after the vernal equinox was the special day of the ancient goddess Eoster of the dawn light.

This year has already begun to fill with new beginnings. I have been way past due for a thorough pruning. Time to cut away those old unnecessary habits that sucks up energy that is needed for creation. The aroma of spring and hope and love and fresh, fertile earth is in the air.

Vancouver, BC has been remarkably good to us, it seems the immigration process which we started last year, is near to completion (fingers crossed). We were worried because we were asked for more proof of our relationship, shortly before Christmas. While living in New York in 2007, I was recovering from typhoid and didn’t work, so I didn’t have typical documents (paychecks, rental agreements) to prove where I was. Fortunately, I had ordered seeds from one of my favorite US seed suppliers, Horizon Herbs, and used the dates on the seed packages, on the stamp on the catalog (their seed catalog has a ton of information about herbal properties) to prove my whereabouts. I have recently heard from Canadian Immigration saying that we probably won’t need an interview, but need to send in a few more documents. This is very positive and marks the seeds of a new beginning.

A few of the seeds I planted earlier have popped up already. In the meantime, I spent a fair amount of time looking through various Canadian (mostly West Coast) seed companies that sell online. I have done a comparison of a few sites I particularly liked. I am new to Canada, so please add any sites that I have missed and your comments by following this link. A few of my favorite US seed companies are discussed here.

Seeds should be freely exchanged and I prefer to find meetup groups, swaps or other community seed sharing arrangements as much as possible. But I also really love looking through seed catalogs and finding out about bizarre and exotic plants. It is amazing what is happening around the world with local communities gathering their heritage seeds and regaining the sacred respect for seed. On a slightly different note, Norway has even built a very well protected seed vault dubbed the “doomsday vault”, saving seeds in case of huge natural or man-made disasters. We can even follow a Watson scholar as he travels the globe learning about seed saving. People have been saving seeds as long as we have planted them. Companies such as Monsanto, who think that they can patent life and are in motion to control seed, to control food, are being stopped. Their time is over, their greed will only destroy life. Hopefully we haven’t already allowed them to go too far.

The recent rallying cry “LOCAL” is a noble one, but we also must beware of leaning so far that we fall off the other side of the horse, as we so often do. Farmers around the world are fighting well organized multinational companies and need the support of the international community of local small scale farmers. The last thing we need is another thing to divide us. There are many groups around the world that are successfully connecting local businesses and NGOs around the world with conferences such as the World Social Forum that is based in Brazil.