It's almost spring, the time when people start think-ing about planting things, making things grow. The days are longer, the sun's reach is stronger. Even de-voted skiers are growing weary of winter's harsh and unpredictable ways. It's time for a change, time for renewal.

To the gardener, the wanderer in the woods, the farmer, seeds are everywhere. They may be a blessing or a scourge, but wherever we look, the earth is abounding with seeds. Fortunately, nature is selective, and not every seed gets to reach its full potential.

What determines a seed's "success" depends on certain external factors coming into play in the proper sequence. There may be a million poplar seeds but only one of them becomes a tree, all because it landed in the right place, got the right amount of water, sunlight, and so on. Nothing mowed it down, stepped on it, or ate it. Every tree you see is lucky in that way—it escaped the fate of its failed fellows.

All of us are, in a certain sense, seeds. What are seeds but vehicles of potential? The difference is that with nature, a seed's success depends totally on external factors. With a human being, external factors are relevant only at the beginning of our life, when we need someone to watch over us. But once we're grown, and we come to recognize that there's something more within us, once we get a glimpse of it, then it's up to us to do the rest.

So, unlike anything else in nature, it's up to us to find the circumstance where we can grow. If you live your life as if you were an ordinary seed—if you, as they used to say, go with the flow—you'll be relying on nature to deliver you, and nature's got enough to do finding a nurturing spot for that one-in-a-million poplar seed.

It's up to us to find the place where the water is, to find what nurtures us. And in doing that, in assuming this all-important role, we actually become something more—not just the seed, but the cultivator of the seed. We become the farmer who takes care of that seed so that it can attain itself. If we remember that there is something in us that has yet to reach its full potential, we have to become that farmer.

When we start cultivating what's real in us, we find that we have many characteristics in us that need attention. But without that attention, without the farmer's willingness to work, what's unique about us will remain dormant. We'll never come to fruit. Exactly like all those unlucky poplar seeds.

This is when a person's aim becomes crucial. If your aim is to begin paying attention to what's lying there inside you, you can begin living a different kind of life. Once you know what you're aiming for, you have a standard. Here's the task: You're in the course of your life, involved in the particular circumstances it presents to you every moment, and you have to remember and hold to that aim. You have to remember what you're going for and then look at your life's circumstances to see if what you're doing is furthering your chances of achieving that aim. Is what I'm doing helping me achieve my aim or not?

If you say, "I want to develop my being and become a full human being, the most full human being that I am capable of becoming," you'll have to see if how you're living day to day aligns with that desire.

It's not just a matter of reading books or getting caught up in thoughts of your liberation. It comes down to things like this: When you talk about your interest in becoming more human, the people you spend your life with make fun of you. They ridicule you. They think it's ridiculous. You have to ask yourself, Is this getting me where I want to go? Is this a help or a hindrance?

If you're serious, if you have an aim and can hold to it, you have a standard, something you can follow. Without it, you go whichever way the wind blows. You never attain anything. You end up being someone who goes through the motions in life, goes from the cradle to the grave and nothing happens. As people who let external circumstances drive them—their jobs, their desires—get older, they begin to sense this probability, and it can be very painful. They're no different than they were when they began. The bloom of youth is off them, their bodies are beginning to fail them. Time is running out. The seeds of possibility within them never sprout because they never cultivated them.

You can see the beginning of this terrible loss in the way we raise our childrn. Children have this wonderful capability to be creative. But then they go to school and the school isn't interested in that. All that matters are science and mathematics, getting the highest test scores. The child with creative ability gets lost, or buried.

I used to teach writing in the public schools. What I discovered was that these seeds of artistic ability and creativity are in everybody. They liked me in one particular school, so I could get away with a little bit of murder. I taught young people how to write by going into themselves. I nurtured them. I didn't teach them what I was supposed to teach them—things like spelling and grammar, the subjects that kill creativity. It was a gamble, because they still had to pass their finals.

But they learned how to write. They wrote things that made me cry, they were so beautiful. They would say, "I didn't know I could do this." If anybody made any kind of effort, you would see it. And in the end, although they weren't taught what they supposedly needed to know, they scored the highest of all the English classes. They woke up to themselves. It made all the difference.

One of the things Jesus said that has caused any number of problems for people was "Be ye perfect like your heavenly father is perfect." What he was talking about is this: Become that which you can become. Come to your completeness by fulfilling all those things that are still dormant within you.

So, let all your seeds come to fruit. That's your perfection, and God, by Jesus' understanding, is the being in whom all their possibilities have been realized. We have to do the same. All our possibilities have to become real. So, be perfect. So, aim for that.