To Everything, There Is A Season
Ecclesiastes 3:1

This morning, I was out in my garden, and I gathered buckets of tomatoes. I had started those tomatoes as tiny plants under lights in my house in late winter. In fact, we had an ice storm outside, and I was feeding my winter birds at that time, and I was struck by the sound of the sleet, as it shattered the silence of that cold, winter day.

Little shards of sleet fell upon the frozen ground.
A mockingbird greeted me at my back door.
Chittering chinks of ice filled the air.
Jacki Kellum Journal January 15, 2024

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i write lots of these little two-liners in my journal, and I don’t know when I’ll use them — in terms of turning them into cash — but I cannot help but believe that when I note these observations of nature, I am planting seeds.

Several years ago, I wrote in my journal about how I sow seeds as I write:

Sowing Sonnets
by Jacki Kellum

Word found,
Twist it round,
Listen for the fairy sound.

Feelings  mound,
Thoughts profound,
Sowing seeds in sonnet ground.

Copyright Jacki Kellum December 7, 2015

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Nature and my garden are great sources of inspiration for me, and today, as I thought about how long it takes for a seed to become a tomato that I can eat, I also thought about the waiting process that we artists and writiers go through–waiting for our seeds to hatch.

Your art is like a pregnancy. In almost all cases, it takes a long, long time to make a child. We must learn to wait.