Rise Like Seeds

Izula Maximillen

 

We come to the soil with hands that remember — hands that have buried seeds and birthed dreams, hands that have broken and mended, hands that know the difference between holding on and letting go.

The earth does not ask us to be young. 

She asks only that we be present.

And so we arrive, bone-weary and root-strong, carrying the weight of seasons we survived by showing up again and again and again.

 

Still, we rise.

 

Like seed through concrete, like green through winter, like women who learned long ago that survival is not the same as surrender.

The land remembers our footsteps. The soil knows our names.we are the daughters of the ones who would not break, who bent like grass in the storm and stood back up when the wind passed.

We are both. the footsteps the land remembers and the ones who would not break.

 

Our backs may ache with the honest labor of years. Our knees may speak in the language of weather and time. But our spirits — our spirits are still rooting down, still reaching up, still making green things grow in ground that was told nothing could flourish.

 

This is what we know:

 

Fortification is not about force. It is about depth.

Strength is not about youth. It is about return in cycles — returning to the field, returning to ourselves, returning to the conversation with the earth that began before we had words for it.

We are the soil and the seed. We are the storm and the stillness after. We are the harvest and the hand that gathers it and the prayer of thanks that follows.

We do not apologize for our years. We claim them. We tend them. We grow them into medicine for the women coming behind us, and the land stretching out before us, and the children who will inherit what we chose to restore.

 

So let us begin today not by asking what we have lost, but by remembering what we carry:

 

We are aging.

We are women. 

We are farmers with the memory of every season we survived. The wisdom of every mistake we survived it with. The quiet, bone-deep knowing that we belong here — in this soil, in these bodies, in this work that does not end when we are young, but deepens and fortifies and becomes more true when shared, the longer we tend it with intention, attention and care

 

~Izula (Feb 2026- a love letter to women farmers, aging strong)