To Get to the Seed of Our Stories

In August last year I wrote about peaches, quoting from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Do I dare to eat a peach, I wrote. Here I am again, eating peaches and writing about them.



When I cut into a recent supermarket peach and halved it, the stone split open exposing the almond-shaped pit inside. This is the actual peach seed, where the peach’s DNA is stored. It's the genesis of the peach and it has an ancient history. A decade or so ago, scientists found eight well-preserved fossilized endocarps, or pits, in southeast China, dating back more than two and a half million years! What we enjoy when we eat our supermarket peaches is a domesticated version of that early fruit.



Seeing the two halves of the peach on my cutting board, the stone broken open and the pit exposed, made me think how the peach is like our stories. Beautiful on the outside—how we want our language to be; and the fruit itself sweet, juicy. Well, maybe not all our stories are sweet, but we certainly want them juicy; irresistible. This can only happen if we’re willing to go deep inside.



Here's the thing: if we want to get to the truth of our stories, we have to crack open the hard stone of protection to expose the seed that contains the DNA of us. This is where our memories reside, where our stories take form.



There’s this, too about the peach: this sweetest gift of summer also contains a whisper of danger. The pit deep inside the stone deep inside the fruit contains a touch of cyanide—a potentially lethal chemical. Rest assured, there’s not enough cyanide in a single peach pit to harm you if you accidentally swallow one or somehow, several. And even then the compound would have to be ground to a fine powder to be absorbed into your body.



I thought about this—the potential danger inside the peach pit as I leaned over the kitchen sink and let the juice of this luscious fruit run down my wrists all the way to my elbows. Who can say, I thought with each rich bite, a peach might not be so good, so juicy, so deliciously satisfying were it not for that breath of danger.



So it is with our stories and what we must risk to write them. This may be, in fact, what creates the true deliciousness of what we write. Without the pit, the peach tree would not exist. Without our stories, who are we?

Do you dare to eat a peach? Do you dare to break the stone and go to the very seed of your DNA to write your stories?