The Seeds are in the Mail – a timeline

Following up on the first in the series, The Love is in the Mail, the second installment recounts the story of the #ds106 seed circle and how some loops can take years to… come full circle. In my story, it has taken eleven years. 

As you may recall from the previous segment, I received several correspondences in the mail in 2022. Three of them, as a matter of fact. Today I am writing about the #ds106 seed circle package. The letter was one of gratitude and friendship from one of my besties, and I am not ashamed to say it brought me to tears. It was so touching, but beyond the heartfelt words, it contained a small package (not a real seed bindle, mind you, but a package nonetheless) of sunflower seeds. Their history and meaning were a blast from the past and a blow to the chest at once. Lets back track a decade or so and I will bring you up to speed.

It was March 2013 when I published the video “Sunflowers Seeds and Sharing,” (on Vimeo), chronicling a project where I bribed readers to leave comments on my blog by promising to send them sunflower seeds in the mail. If I do say so myself, I went over the top on the project. It was a contest where the first ten comments would receive some seeds. I sorted my participants, acquired their mailing addresses (in private chat, not in the comment section), made custom seed pouches with hand-drawn artwork, posted updates, and there was photo sharing (on Flickr). It was wonderful. Open-sharing of your media was more quaint and more community in 2013, and it is astounding to me seeing that the services I used then still have retained this media documenting the project all this time.

(… and yes, you read that right. A video of me from eleven years ago still exists on the Internet! Clean-shaven. Looking young. I mean, it is eleven years ago, after all.) 

I had to dig a little to find the passwords to log in to these old accounts. Flickr, in particular, which I stopped using around 2017, needed some attention, especially if I wanted to share the original pics from that site in the new sunflower timeline tool documenting the growth of the sunflowers this year, in 2024, which I do. Of course gaining access to the site nudged me to browse through my photo collection and reminisce over the MANY pics I had saved there over the years. My first pics were posted there in 2004.

This post is digressing hard. I was planning to stay on the topic of seed sharing, ‘planting seeds’ and timelines and how seeds can come back to you years later. I also wanted to show off my super-tall sunflowers this year. But with all this nostalgia and old videos of me, it is appropriate to drift from theme to theme a bit.

I have been thinking about aging a lot lately. My aging and that of those around me. Seeing that video of myself from over a decade ago and doing a quick comparison in the mirror, I notice some mileage has accumulated in the facial area. Overall, I think I’m doing pretty well, but I can’t help but think how I am perceived by others. I have never been one to make efforte to ‘look younger’, I have always felt I looked younger than I was. Nowadays I am thinking about that more. Some friends have mentioned that the beard I currently wear adds about ten years to my age. It could be even more from a younger person’s perspective. It could be EVEN MORE from a younger, hiring manager’s perspective, if you know what I’m sayin. This is why I am looking into dying the grey out of my beard for my next interview. 

Soooo, getting back on track, I had the brilliant idea this year to do something with the seeds that came back to me in 2022, courtesy of this guy. (Thanks to Flickr I have access to some of my old publicly shared photos, and thanks Scott <3)

Plant them.

Honestly, the last few years have been rather turbulent. A lot of moving. I can share a timeline with you, a little personal project that I have been keeping of my life. In the master ‘lifeline’ I call it I have documented my entire history, the places I have lived, loves I have had and lost, jobs, offices, employers, that sort of thing. Here is just the ‘places I have lived’ segment for the past eight years.

A timeline of our moves

I have been ruminating on a post for a while now to document our journeys in photos and such, there have been so many adventures and we have been fortunate to even have the capacity and resources to pull it off. In general, we have been moving every year since the pandemic began. Before that, I had a couple more moves to boot, and by the records I have kept above that is eight moves in eight years. Needless to say, there has not been much time for growing things. We have been in one place for an entire growing season here and there, but often we would relocate at such inopportune times that setting up a garden never made sense. 

This year, 2024 was different. We moved into a location in a city we have chosen to live in and stay in. We may not be in our forever home, but having moved at the beginning of March allowed me some time and space to invest in the garden. It’s a rather small yard with a north-facing aspect, so it’s not the best for sunshine, but I dove into the soil with vigour and the seeds I had received. 

Once I realized the seeds had germinated and were growing, I wanted to document their progress, so I began taking pictures. I am posting them in Flickr of all places.

Once I realized they were going to be super-sized, I wanted to share their progress, so began building another timeline, this time using H5P.  As with many personal projects I take on, one thing led to another, I ended up spending hours going through my old Flickr photos, reorganizing, editing reminiscing. I reviewed my lifeline, both of moving and my old project and here we are. I have documented some of the technical background of the tool I used to make the timeline over on my professional business website.

I will leave it here for you to follow along.

The sunflowers timeline

I plan to continue documenting the sunflowers growth this year, and who knows, there may even be another seed sharing project to come out of it. I am already getting inspired to make some art and send it to people in the mail.

I honestly I thought I was going to have more to say about “planting seeds”, it is such a lovely metaphor but perhaps that is best left for another post.