Earthseed Day

Today is Earthseed day, y’all. If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s Kindred or The Parable of the Sower, I invite you to get started. A lifetime of conditioning, she tells us, can be overcome (but not easily). It takes nerve to get free. It takes nerve to create. It takes strength to try hard to see what you’d rather not know about yourself and others.

“Shyness is shit,” she says. And positive obsession is the way forward. We’re going to obsess! We can’t seem to help it. Butler’s counsel: Obsess positively! Here’s more on that.

But I mean it when I say it’s Earthseed day. Observe the date on the screen grab below. It’s from Parable of the Sower which was published in 1993. We read it (or a number of students pretend to read it) in my Religion and Science Fiction course each year. Butler’s way of conceiving culture which is, in large part, her way of conceiving religion which is also her way of conceiving politics seems to add up to a positive breakthrough for almost everyone. Her theory of culture is sound. Spoiler alert: It syncs up beautifully with a theory of culture allegedly espoused by Jesus of Nazareth in the synoptic gospels. Go granular or go home.

It’s a positive breakthrough because it invites readers to take their own dreams and positive obsessions (Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Breaking Bad, Sex Education, David Bowie, Beyoncé, Big Thief, Joni Mitchell, Paramore, Bob Marley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, John Green, Marvel Cinematic Universe) more seriously. Hurray for sacred scripture, but also hurray for the stories and images and lyrics and sayings that accompany us through life outside of what’s called “organized religion.” How about unorganized religion. That’s Earthseed. That’s a person treasuring what lands as revelation personally within their own interior self. Holiness anywhere and everywhere.

Butler gives us language for thinking about our own creative intuition in relation to the creative intuition of others. When she speaks of shyness, she’s describing a fear-driven disinclination to pay heed to one’s own creative intuition. This shyness can become a form of estrangement from your own best, liveliest, most responsive self. When succumbed to fully, shyness is torment, a form of death in life. The alternative to shyness is genuine self-advocacy, true devotion to the content you love, a commitment to make the most of it by applying it. Dreaming out loud.

Earthseed, then, is the hodgepodge holiness discovered, stumbled upon, refined, and developed by Lauren Oya Olamina, the narrator-protagonist of Parable of the Sower. Chronicling the survival of a community she forms in the year 2024 within what remains of North America following slow and steady climate catastrophe hastened by an authoritarian political party controlled by foreign interests—Hello!—the story is also a series of dialogues about Earthseed.

If the parable of the sower attributed to Jesus of Nazareth can be thought of as a theory of culture, a contemplative tale offering food for thought on what becomes of people and ideas given their very different contexts (different soils), which can involve withering away, getting eaten up, or, with sufficient moisture, thriving and bearing fruit, Butler’s novel is further contemplation on and beyond Jesus’s contemplation. Lauren follows Marx’s dictum (“the critique of religion is the prerequisite of every critique”) by letting her interlocutors shape her own read on her own studied but also impromptu ideas. In one exchange, she notes the practical benefit of praying to God but bristles at the suggestion that Earthseed has any investment at all in unexamined worship: “Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.”

While an appeal to divine transcendence, a harmonious future, and loving self and others well is at the core of Earthseed, Lauren never claims that her insights aren’t available to anyone and everyone who expends the effort of paying attention. In this, Earthseed is a consciously communal form of positive obsession: “I wish I could believe that it was all supernatural, and that I’m getting messages from God. But then, I don’t believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes, trying to put things down in ways that are as powerful, as simple, and as direct as I feel them.”

But listen. Lauren declines to view Earthseed as a novel form or a peculiarly innovative turn in human history. She describes other characters, even those possessed by catastrophically toxic ideas about self, God, and others, as fellow pilgrims who’ve also “assembled” their conception of self, others, and divinity out of that which has traditioned its way down to them for better and worse.

Earthseed is one more way of naming and describing the process many of us are caught up in as we decide what to make of our own inheritance.

What do we keep?
What do we cling to?
What do we want within our bandwidth, our headspace, our quiver of essential intelligence?
What do we need to rid ourselves of if we hope to access moral adulthood?

Butler herself, though not identifying as religious, had an appreciative word for the faith of her childhood: “I’m glad I was raised as a Baptist, because I got my conscience installed early. I’ve been around people who don’t have one, and they’re damned scary.”

Something of this posture is evident as Lauren gets to know a beautiful man named Bankole. Asking him about his religion, he notes that he doesn’t exactly have one: “When my wife was alive, we went to a Methodist church. Her religion was important to her, so I went along. I saw how it comforted her, and I wanted to believe, but I never could.”

Lauren notes that, while raised Baptist, she’s in a similar boat: “I couldn’t make myself believe either, and I couldn’t tell anyone. My father was the minister. I kept quiet and began to understand Earthseed.”

“Began to invent Earthseed,” Bankole interjects.

This is where Lauren offers a beautifully nuanced take on what occurs when we thoughtfully take up—and, if necessary, put to the side or drop altogether—the stories, images, lyrics, and sayings that serve our human thriving, the available lore, if you like, of a given time and place. It isn’t invention exactly. “Began to discover and understand it. Stumbling across the truth isn’t the same as making things up.” Earthseed, she explains, is about discovering and acting upon “the essentials,” which will always differ between people, experiences, soils, and other contexts.

Here’s a little adage for the believer or the never-believer in Earthseed: Whatever lore helps you love yourself and others more is lore enough.

I leave you with a screengrab of notes Octavia Butler wrote to herself. Notes made manifest today. Earthseed day.

Happy Earthseed Day, y’all.