Learning Activities

Seeds of Hope

© Kevin LaNave (Center for Service-Learning and Social Change), October 10, 2003

Objectives:

As I've searched for images of hope, I've found some that use inanimate objects (e.g. snowflakes landing on a branch; pebbles that eventually outweigh a boulder; water that eventually reshapes rocks or a coastline, or that move a mill).

While I appreciate such images, and often share them with students, they lack the quality of life.

That's why I like the "Hurricane Story," because it involves breath.

That's also why I like the following poem.

Preparation

Have a variety of seeds on display.

Procedure

  1. Invite students to think about what it might be like to feel like a seed encased in the earth.

    (I think of seeds as being imprisoned, in a way, in the soil, yet capable of drawing nourishment from what could otherwise overwhelm it -- capable too of finding the "path of least resistance" in order to burst forth into the sunlight.)

  2. Introduce the poem "The Seedkeepers" by talking about the tremendous imprisonment/oppression experienced by the Palestinian people.

    Then share the poem (see end of this activity)

  3. Discuss students' reaction; possibilities include:

    • the connection between their images of being a seed and the power of the seed expressed in the poem
    • the connection between the Palestinian people's struggle and the image of hope the seeds provide.

When working with groups of Christian faith background: Consider how Jesus often used seeds in his parables-- talking about the smallness of the mustard seed that becomes the amazingly large bush/tree, talking about scattering seeds that grow a harvest of a hundredfold.

The Seed Keepers

Vandana Shiva, in Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, (Boston: South End Press, 1997), writes, "I frequently draw inspiration from the Palestinian poem, 'The Seed Keepers.'

Burn our land,
burn our dreams
pour acid onto our songs
cover with sawdust
the blood of our massacred people
muffle with your technology
the screams of all that is free,
wild and indigenous.

Destroy
Destroy
our grass and soil
raze to the ground
every farm and every village
our ancestors had built
every tree, every home,
every book, every law,
and all the equity and harmony.

Flatten with your bombs
every valley; erase with your edits
our past,
our literature, our metaphor.

Denude the forests
and the earth
'til no insect,
no bird
no word
can find a place to hide.

Do that and more.

I do not fear your tyranny.
I do not despair ever
for I guard one seed
a little live seed
that I shall safeguard
and plant again. (p. 40-41)