“The stories always came along with their seeds, and this is what made culture. The people in flesh and blood might remain after losing their seeds and stories, but they would not be the real people of the seed. The world is populated with them.

People who've lost their seeds. They are not bad useless people, but they are not real people until they refind their seeds. The real people they used to be, like the seed, have vanished from this visible dimension to hide in an inner world inside modern citified people. In some small never-looked-at place in the forgotten wilderness of their souls, invisible to the forces that would invade and take over, their indigenous seeds of culture and lifeways live exiled from their everyday consciousness. The entire world is now at this doorway. Seeds and spirits of real culture are things that not only can't be comprehended through television, but don't want to be on camera. This land of the forgotten wilderness cannot be photographed. Together in these times our real souls live a nomadic refugee existence hidden from the modern mind deep inside the wilderness of an unassailable inner dimension, living only in the ecstatic and feeing all objective study or voyeuristic scrutiny.

Throughout the Highlands their culture of this kind of seed life and its ritual consciousness could have regenerated itself, and would have, if it had not been for the post-earthquake invasion of petroleum-dependent lifeways and their bankrupting credit systems, that promised "aid" to governments and private institutions operating in countries whose people were neither represented by their government nor understood as worthy by the world business community. So many crops and stores of fairly sustainable food of self-sufficient peoples in their own interdependent cultural groups, spiritual land bases, and ancient regional market systems had been lost, buried, burned, half-grown, or destroyed just enough by that quake so as to leave a vulnerable tear in the age-old fabric of Highland life through which foreign-fueled interests, both left and right, were able to saturate the people with a dependency on a top-heavy unnatural economy, that within only the eight years that followed this invasion of post-earthquake relief scams, practically all the rare squashes, corns, beans, cotton, etc., had literally disappeared from the land, market, and diet along with the stories, rituals, and lifestyle of the people they belonged to.

The great irony of course is that most all of the ancient strains of seeds lost in similarly troubled conditions worldwide were the living ancestors of the overly specialized nutritionally weak, genetically-tinkered-with varieties of seeds pushed onto the people by this modern monster petroleum economy agribusiness travesty. These weaker chemically dependent nonnutritional seeds, like the modern chemically dependent people who unquestionably depend on them, have by their exclusive use banished into extinction both the vitality of all seeds and the vitality of rea human cultures. This is what has left modern people without a real origination point, why they never "belong" and are never truly "at home anywhere, having to export their unrootedness to the rest of the world.”

- Martín Pretchel (From his book "The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic")

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The image shows the results of some of my efforts to “keep the seeds alive” both literally and figuratively (Hopi corn and various heirloom chilis from our garden). Hopi corn is not just more nutritious and more drought tolerant than corporate hybrid or gmo corn, each kernel carries with her the living embodiment of the story of an animistic culture that tended (and tends) the earth reverently. These seeds nourish more than just the body, they root their stories into the heart and imagination feeding the soul.

I send out seeds with each copy of my book purchased to invite each person to able to not only feed themselves but also to reawaken the dormant seeds within the soul that Martín speaks about above.