This short story feels like it needs to have some deeper meaning attached to it, but even I have a hard time figuring out what that meaning must be. I wrote it while in a very reminiscent mood -- I'd been thinking about God again, and remembering the time when God and magic and fairy godmothers were all the same thing.
When I was an adolescent -- "fourteen, wizened, sardonic" -- I suffered from severe depression. In the descent into the black prison of my own mind, I lost something very important: my faith. Now that I am older, grown, I have begun to shed that old depression and venture forth into the healthy realms of thought once again. And these days I find myself standing on the metaphorical shore of the lake of religious belief. The waters lap at my toes, enticing; yet I am still afraid to jump in.
"The Wishing Seeds" is based on things which actually did happen. I do remember a place in the woods where one could find countless pod-stalks, and a day when each one I opened only yeilded dried seeds. I do recall crying and never going back to that place, because I felt that my last childish, innocent hopes had been violently crushed by an unfeeling God. That may have been one of the factors which precipitated my 4 years of atheism.
Today I am not yet a Christian, but I am no longer an atheist. And as each day passes, as I think about it more, I realize that hope comes from within, not from puffy white "money-catchers" carried on the wind. But I think that the knowledge I gained from the wishing-seeds is the basis for this realization -- for it was they that first taught me to hope.
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