Nature often has something to teach us when we allow space to stop, look, ask questions and listen. Sunflowers have a way of bringing a smile to my face, tall with their heads held high in the sky and always turning toward the light. Their faces are so happy. They give me such delight and I am reminded to turn my eyes toward the Creator, the One who calls me the beloved and delights in me.
As the sunflowers age and explode with an abundance of seeds, their heads begin to bend over and bow. Mary Oliver suggests that we ask them questions in the following section of her poem, The Sunflower. (total poem is written below)
Don't be afraid to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds--
each one a new life!--
Joyce Rupp speaks of going to the sunflower field to listen and learn what they have to teach her. She recalls, "And speak they did, about the necessity to freely give away what had been their glory. I understood that the dying field held not only a harvest of fulfillment but the acquiescence of what it contained, an acceptance of giving away what was never theirs to keep."
As the sunflowers grow and mature, the moisture from the rain flows up through their roots to the stems, transforming the huge showy flowers into nourishing seeds. Then, as if knowing it is time to let go, the withering process begins. The leaves dry, and heads droop with the heaviness of ripened seeds ready to be harvested. Perhaps this is a lesson to all of us of our own diminishment and losses that bend us over with heaviness. Rupp notes, "unable to hold their heads high any longer, the sunflowers bowed to the way life naturally unfolds--the ageless pattern of life, death, rebirth--and taught me anew that I, too, wend my way through this configuration, slowly bending the stem of my life, allowing my head to reach my heart, accepting the pattern in order to have peace".
The Sunflowers by Mary Oliver,
Come with me into the field of sunflowers. Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines creak like ship masts, their green leaves, so heavy and many, fill all day with the sticky sugars of the sun. Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends; they have wonderful stories of when they were young – the important weather, the wandering crows. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions! Their bright faces, which follow the sun, will listen, and all those rows of seeds – each one a new life! hope for a deeper acquaintance; each of them, though it stands in a crowd of many, like a separate universe, is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy. Come and let us talk with those modest faces, the simple garments of leaves, the coarse roots in the earth so uprightly burning.
Reflection
How do the sunflowers speak to you - the tall flower that turns toward the sunlight; new life; the withering process, being bent over with grief and loss; the generosity of freely giving away its seed; transformation from life, death, and rebirth or perhaps some other lesson?
Song: Sending you Light by Melanie DeMore
Resource:
Rupp, Joyce (2021). Return to the Root: reflections on the inner life. Notre Dame: Sorbin Books.
Oliver, Mary. (2017). Devotions. New York: Penguin Random House.
