a field-guide
for this season

A space to hear your own voice respond to the questions that matter most to you.

I kept hearing people say that if they had more time, they would make something. Most of us have the time. What we don't have is a place for it that isn't already claimed: by work, by likes, by what we are meant to be selling.

A good question does something to you. Sit with it long enough and you empty the drawer of whatever was floating on top, until you reach what was at the root. Here you can write for the sake of writing, and read your own thoughts back.

I grew up in Kenya, in a family-run bookstore, among gorgeous coffee-table books about Africa and the accounts of explorers who had ventured where few had gone. They came back with stories. I want to bring what I loved most about those worlds, their beauty and their patience, to the season many of us are in now: in transition, building a portfolio life, mentoring others, living across generations.

Each entry begins with a seed: a photograph and a beautiful question. You sit with it long enough to let whatever is waiting inside come out and say itself. That reflection is your shoot. Online, the field-guide holds everyone who contributes. The special-edition print copies gather the seeds themselves, with journal pages for your own reflections.

You do not have to be a writer. Just the curiosity to stay with a question a little longer than usual.

seeds & shoots is a public good, released on the solstices and equinoxes: four issues a year, each carrying the meaning of its turning. March for what is beginning, June for what is at its fullest, September for what is ready to be released, December for what endures.

These four moments are worth pausing on. An equinox is the instant the Sun crosses the celestial equator, when day and night come out almost equal across most of the planet. A solstice is when the Sun reaches its farthest point north or south, about our planet’s tilt of 23.4 degrees, giving one hemisphere its longest day and the other its longest night.

They are also four kinds of equal. At an equinox, day and night come out almost even everywhere. At a solstice, each hemisphere takes its turn at the extreme, one with its longest day while the other has its longest night. Equal can mean different things depending on where you stand.

Here is the beautiful part. From the Sun, nothing changes at all.

The solstices and equinoxes are an artifact of a tilted observer, Earth passing four marked points of its orbit. Mars, tilted about the same, keeps its own on its own calendar, and ours would mark nothing there. So vitally important to us, and so entirely local. That is the capacity we are here to cultivate: to notice the turnings we take for granted, and to sit with equanimity among all the possibilities at once.

It lives by a simple rhythm, create, share, circulate, restore. What the print editions take to make, their proceeds put back.

An issue is small on purpose: three to six seeds, chosen to hold the turning. The point of view lives in what we ask, not in what we cut. Contributors help curate what moves them, and I hold the final shape. Online, everyone who sat with a question is here.

Zaheer MeraliPublisher & Editor