The following excerpt appears in Heather Coburn Flores' book, Food Not Lawns (Chelsea Green, September 2006). The thought was prompted by an insight I had while sitting on the porch with friends, during a Fall seedswap arranged by the Food Not Lawns collective.

Seed Swaps for Cultural Evolution.

The Sages insist there is a fundamental unity through all diversity. So, where's the evidence? One of the most potent examples may well be manifested in the palpable reality of the humble seed swap. Think about it. Take two ostensibly separate worlds, that of humans and plants, and imagine any singular occasion that better affords the opportunity to both witness and nurture the 'energetics of togetherness' between and among them. At a seed swap, is it the people who are collectively engendering deeper and stronger interrelationships in the green world, or vice versa, and then some? Where are the boundaries between the dynamic interplays of these two cultures? Look with eyes that see. They don't exist. They're an illusion. And seed swaps don't simply serve to drop the veil of separateness, they're also fundamentally about catalyzing the birth of profound collective synergies and strengths that each realm, plant and human, bring to each other. You'll be hard-pressed to find a higher expression of the gift of Life to itself, anywhere.

Which is, of course, why seed swaps are where the sharing and creation of real power is grounded, and not in the rootless and utterly temporary illusion which passes for social physicianship that we see in capitols and elsewhere. Deep gardeners know that you can walk out of a seed swap with a form of authentic power in your pocket with the literal potential to transform the politics of an entire bioregion. And, of course, the cosmic irony is that this form of power transcends all political differences. As the Sages say, conscious evolution is not about gaining power, but becoming power. Perhaps that's why our experience around seed swaps consistently demonstrates that they don't simply attract the finest seed in any locale, but some of the finest people, too. Local seed swaps are where the deepest indigenous wisdom of land and people become most potentized, shared and enlivened; they stand at the arrowpoint of the evolutionary impulse in any bioregion.