Some seeds only open in fire.
It’s called a serotinous pinecone. It seals itself shut with resin, holding its seeds inside for years. Sometimes decades.
Most cones open when they’re ready. Not these.
These stay shut while everything around them grows, waiting for one thing: a wildfire, and heat hot enough to melt the seal.
The natural question is:
Why would a tree do that?
Because fire is part of the design.
The same fire that destroys also clears underbrush, opens the canopy to light, and leaves the soil rich with ash. By the time the seeds drop, the ground is no longer crowded, it has space to thrive.
Of course, people aren’t trees.
But I’m sure you’ve felt something like this.
A hard season arrives and something shifts. You find a new gear within that you didn’t know existed. You say the thing you were avoiding. You leave what you had outgrown. You move before you feel ready.
It’s not that the difficulty is good, but something in you becomes available under pressure that wasn’t available before.
It’s a hard season right now.
Across the world, inside institutions, at our own kitchen tables, a lot of what once felt solid is moving all at once. It’s easier to see what’s breaking than what might be forming.
Many of us are grieving, and that’s understandable.
But it may not be the whole picture.
So here’s the question I’ve been sitting with:
What has the fire made available, that you couldn’t access before?
More soon,
Tiffany