I felt an old scar of mine today and wondered that it didn’t hurt. The scar is a healed place, a fixed place, a place where I overcame an injury and knit back together.

It is not the scars of bygone days that trouble me now, it’s the seeds that those days planted.

Seeds are living things. Seeds grow and bear fruit. And then seeds spread.

The floggings of my fundamentalist past are long since gone and the sting stopped some years ago. I rarely think about those pains now, except to stare in the mirror at some ancient stripe and try to recall “now where did I get that one?”

What remains are the seeds of self-doubt and faux certainty, the seeds of judgment and scorn, the seeds of fight and fright that from time to time still bloom in my soul.

My scars just tell me “you survived.” The seeds then whisper “it’s not over yet.”

It isn’t over. It may never be over. But I’m still unplanting and it’s a little better all the time.