Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”: A Friend When I Needed One Most
(Originally written July 20, 2024. Posting on NYE.)
You may have heard that today, July 20th, 2024 is Parable of the Sower Day, the date in which Octavia Butler’s seminal and eerily accurate dystopian novel begins.
I read this book for the first time earlier this year. When society and many of the people I was close to continued to choose the wishful guise of denial, here was someone who saw this coming, who sees what’s happening. This book was a friend when I needed one, when I was grieving the loss of friends and community spaces.
This book is the journal of a teenager (Lauren) caught in a collapsing society embroiled in climate conflict. This is Lauren’s survivor’s manual, collecting her thoughts and her philosophy, her feelings about God. Her confessions, her thoughts and feelings, felt like my own.
Instead of writing a book of the dead, Lauren hopes to write a book of the living, and that’s exactly what Octavia Butler has done. That is why it rings so painfully true yet also gives me hope. Because that’s what acceptance does, no matter how difficult. We as a society continue to prefer isolation and denial to hard truths and necessary change. Whenever I meet someone, anyone, even someone fictional, who isn’t in denial, who feels what I feel, I gain hope.
Hope is what we need to change, to fight what’s happening.
Parable of the Sower is about rebuilding community, but it’s also about writing, and the power of keeping a journal. As Lauren says, “writing doesn’t end the pain, but it helps.” There’s a lot of pain in the world right now, a lot of pain in my bones, my heart. But whenever I give myself time to write, to feel, it helps. Each time I do is an act of self-acceptance that makes it easier to accept harsh realities.
With “Earthseed,” Butler creates her own religion around the idea that “God is change.”
No religion has felt more true. Sowing or sharing words, thoughts, feelings with someone, as Octavia Butler does through Lauren to the reader, is a spiritual act of love, of connection, of revolutionary community building. That is the parable of the sower, the artist.
The best books, the best ideas plant a seed in the reader. One that will grow in magical and unique ways within every reader. That is what great art does. Earthseed has been planted within me, and I vow to nurture its growth.
