"To be of the earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth"
About this Quote
The subtext is quietly radical for a modern reader trained to treat "growth" as personal branding. Here, growth hurts, and the payoff isn't self-actualization but usefulness: "being food for someone". Even joy ("bursting and bearing fruit") is immediately tethered to expenditure and dispersal. The self is not a sealed project; it's a temporary vessel for nourishment and continuation. That line about "the love of being food" reframes sacrifice as relational rather than tragic - a Buddhist-inflected compassion where the boundary between giver and receiver dissolves.
Context matters: Miyazawa was a rural Japanese poet with deep ties to farming life and Buddhist thought, writing in a period of social strain and modernization. The quote reads like an agrarian counter-manifesto against abstraction, reminding an increasingly mechanized world that life cycles are not clean arcs but compost: eros and rot, death and birth, braided together.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Miyazawa, Kenji. (2026, January 15). To be of the earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-be-of-the-earth-is-to-know-the-restlessness-of-172115/
Chicago Style
Miyazawa, Kenji. "To be of the earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-be-of-the-earth-is-to-know-the-restlessness-of-172115/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"To be of the earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-be-of-the-earth-is-to-know-the-restlessness-of-172115/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.
