Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

The Moss rabbit house is a converted three-car garage added to the property in the 1980s according to Dad. It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed.

Richard Moss repaired the walls and roof, put in windows for cross ventilation, and in general, made the place almost fit for people to live in. In fact, it’s much better than what a lot of people live in now on the outside. He built rows and tiers of cages-hutches—

and put in more electric lights and ceiling fans. The fans can be made to work on kid power.

He’s hooked them up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans. The Moss kids hate it, but they know what they’ll get if they don’t do it.

I don’t know how many rabbits the Mosses have now, but it seems they’re always killing and skinning and doing disgusting things to pelts. Even a little monopoly is worth a lot of trouble.

The two thieves had managed to stuff 13 rabbits into canvas sacks by the time our watchers spotted them. The watchers were Alejandro Montoya and Julia Lincoln, one of Shani Yannis’s sisters. Mrs.

Montoya has two kids sick with flu so she’s off the watch roster for a while.

Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Montoya followed the plan that the group of watchers had put together at their meetings. Without a word of command or warning, they fired their guns into the air two or three times each, at the same time, blowing their whistles full blast. They kept to cover, but inside the Moss house, someone woke up and turned on the rabbit house lights. That could have been a lethal mistake for the watchers, but they were hidden behind pomegranate bushes.

The two thieves ran like rabbits.

Abandoning sacks, rabbits, pry bars, a long coil of rope, wire cutters, and even an excellent long aluminum ladder, they scrambled up that ladder and over the wall in seconds. Our wall is three meters high and topped off with pieces of broken glass as well as the usual barbed wire and the all but invisible Lazor wire. All the wire had been cut in spite of our efforts. What a pity we couldn’t afford to electrify it or set other traps. But at least the glass— the oldest, simplest of our tricks— had gotten one of them. We found a broad stream of dried blood down the inside of the wall this morning.

We also found a Glock 19 pistol where one of the thieves had dropped it. Mrs. Lincoln and Mr.

Montoya could have been shot. If the thieves hadn’t been scared out of their minds, there could have been a gun battle. Someone in the Moss house or a neighboring house could have been hurt or killed.

Cory went after Dad about that once they were alone in the kitchen tonight.

“I know,” Dad said. He sounded tired and miserable.

“Don’t think we haven’t thought about those things.

That’s why we want to scare the thieves away. Even shooting into the air isn’t safe. Nothing’s safe.”

“They ran away this time, but they won’t always run.”

“I know.”

“So what, then? You protect rabbits or oranges, and maybe get a child killed?”

Silence.

“We can’t live this way!” Cory shouted. I jumped. I’ve never heard her sound like that before.

“We do live this way,” Dad said. There was no anger in his voice, no emotional response at all to her shouting. There was nothing. Weariness. Sadness.

I’ve never heard him sound so tired, so… almost beaten. And yet he had won. His idea had beaten off a pair of armed thieves without our having to hurt anyone. If the thieves had hurt themselves, that was their problem.

Of course they would come back, or others would come. That would happen no matter what. And Cory was right. The next thieves might not lose their guns and run away. So what? Should we lie in our beds and let them take all we had and hope they were content with stripping our gardens? How long does a thief stay content? And what’s it like to starve?

“We couldn’t make it without you,” Cory was saying.

She wasn’t shouting now. “That could have been you out there, facing criminals. Next time it might be you. You could be shot, protecting the neighbors’

rabbits.”

“Did you notice,” Dad said, “that every off-duty watcher answered the whistles last night? They came out to defend their community.”

“I don’t care about them! It’s you I’m worried about!”

“No,” he said. “We can’t think that way any more.

Cory, there’s nobody to help us but God and ourselves. I protect Moss’s place in spite of what I think of him, and he protects mine, no matter what he thinks of me. We all look out for one another.” He paused. “I’ve got plenty of insurance. You and the kids should be able to make it all right if— ”

“No!” Cory said. “Do you think that’s all it is? Money?

Do you think— ?”

“No, Babe. No.” Pause. “I know what it is to be left alone. This is no world to be alone in.”

There was a long silence, and I didn’t think they would say any more. I lay on my bed, wondering if I should get up and shut my door so I could turn on my lamp and write. But there was a little more.

“What are we supposed to do if you die?” she demanded, and I think she was crying. “What do we do if they shoot you over some damn rabbits?”

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

That was the end of their talk. I lay in the dark for a long time, thinking about what they had said. Cory was right again. Dad might get hurt. He might get killed. I don’t know how to think about that. I can write about it, but I don’t feel it. On some deep level, I don’t believe it. I guess I’m as good at denial as anyone.

So Cory is right, but it doesn’t matter. And Dad is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak— too poor, too hungry, too sick— to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out.

There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!

7

We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe, Godseed is all there is— all that

Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2025

Sometimes naming a thing— giving it a name or discovering its name— helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it.

The particular God-is-Change belief system that seems right to me will be called Earthseed. I’ve tried to name it before. Failing that, I’ve tried to leave it unnamed. Neither effort has made me comfortable.

Name plus purpose equals focus for me.

Well, today, I found the name, found it while I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don’t have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere— the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island— where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived.