~ PART ONE ~
( the lighter side )
It is said that sunflowers begin their day facing to the East, awaiting the sun’s rise on the horizon and its first drink of light. As the day progresses, the sun and its rays travel across the sky to the West, and with it follows the bright face of the sunflower. As the sun disappears beyond the Western horizon and darkness falls, their bright faces shift back to the East, awaiting its rise again.
As it always has.
Sounds like romantic myth, but nay, my friend, tis verifiable truth. Following the sun. Drinking in her every drop of light, full faced, in rhythmic waltz across the vast arc of sky.
However, there is a twist to this delightful truth.
It is only the young whippersnappers in the sunflower tribe that follow this path. The tribal elders are not so flexible (literally), curious (maybe?), needy (umm), or maybe they already know the secrets. They can sit comfortably in their lovely, wizened, more mature (and stiffer) sunflower bodies, rocking in the garden breeze and simply no cause to chase as such. Ever facing East, their cup is filled, and served, content to live out the rest of their days.
That’s wildly close to home for too many of us.
There’s a term for the sun-chasing process these young’ns partake in. It’s called heliotropism, and literally means to move toward the light. Ultimately, that’s what we all anticipate in life, and surely its completion, isn’t it? But, tho this isn’t that, except where,.. maybe it is, as ambassadors of Mother Nature with such vital, basic truths. The returns and rewards speak for themselves.
A phrase I read describing this heliotropic doing is “solar tracking”. The solar tracking process is known to enhance growth rates and photosynthesis in plants. Growing things. Flashback to your biology lessons that photosynthesis (Latin: “light” + “to make“) is creating food from light – the core force in a plant’s own nutrition and life process. Tracking the light as such enhances photosynthesis so they gain as much of that rich light as possible to grow. Fuel, baby. I didn’t know this next bit, but my Inner Science Nerd For Pretty Cool Stuff wishes to enlighten you (sorry, .. too easy, that pun ). Here it is: Following the light as it does (still talking heliotropism here) increases the flower temperature which then increases the rate of pollen germination in the flower (think: life promoting) which then attracts more bees and other pollinators.
Pretty cool, right?
Moving toward light. The simplest explanation of fundamental happiness that I can think of, or the journey of living more wholly and fully. Live it. Follow it. Know and answer that light inside that feeds us. Darkness falls – Rinse. Reset. Repeat.
I have a rich memory from several years ago as I lived and worked in a beautiful, rural part of central Texas. Rolling hills, trees, birds of every variety and an enormous wide open sky. Sweet medicine for the soul. My job, tho, was demanding, calling for me often to arrive early, stay late, and a good bit of tension in between. It was twenty minutes from my home, down a four lane country road. Often I would stress in needing to get there, and line up my thoughts and my center inside so when I arrived I could be some part of my best self; then returning home, I’d do the same. The tonic for that came halfway thru the drive.
It was sunflowers. Millions of them. Amassed in a sea of yellow faces a mile or so long on either side of the road. I recall my surprise as they emerged after winter, growing taller as the warm season progressed. My happy place. I anticipated their greeting daily, often pulling over to just be in it all, bookending me with their quiet, convincing joy.
In travelling this road at the beginning and close of the day, amidst the hardly subtle presence of these magical friends, I noticed something amazing. This patch of road stretched North and South, the fields flanking me on the East and West. With the sun fresh in its climb in the East, I’d crest the hill to this shangrila, their bright faces gazing en mass at the rise of light there, to my right. I recall the unusual vision, an aha that they weren’t all facing the road, as if to be planted that way. But no, a hallelujah chorus they were, in allegiance to that noble giver of sunlight. All of them.
Each morning as I’d pass, or park, the left side of the road shown their beautiful faces my direction – toward that lovely early sun – but on the other side, my right, every single one of those millions had their backs to me. An irrelevant witness, I was. Even more enchanting, and awakening, tho, was that, upon my return home, the exact opposite occurred … as tho a mirror held up from earlier. The field that had obliged me earlier with eager faces now turned their backs, facing West, while the other side now greeted me. Whoa. An illusionary line, this road, down the middle of the show. It was marveling, learning by the awe of this observation and lacking the magic secret I have earlier shared with you of their heliotropic super powers.
These gentle friends were spiritual refreshment on either side of my long days. The imprint of its marvel of nature left its mark. A mighty village of young (enough) sunflowers, stretching taller with the season, in unflinching loyalty to the sun, her reward of thriving sustenance far beyond their own benefit for it.
And, lo, in sobering experience and reflection this day, these weeks (in March of 2022), the call of this natural beauty raises her voice, and speaks. My mood grows pensive to her somber tones of sensibility to the senseless. We are fighting again – still – this world, in ferocious bites to peace. The stretches of humanity’s extremes are wielding their bully sticks in brutal offenses, manipulations, entwisted lies … that we simply cannot disregard, compartmentalize, or sleep thru anymore. No more. There is seriousness in these words here. Beyond preferred levity and ease, or toward them. It’s all connected, tho, and needs calling out, I think.
The opportunities and moments in profound truth, compassion, unshielded clarity, and awakened unity blow their trumpets for all to hear. We ache and hurt for our world, our embattled neighbors who share our story of humanity, all of us – rattling our comfort zones to rise, reaching to help, lifting – hearts, spirits, lives – in the cross hairs of history. From the silos of convenient solitude to a paradigm of solidarity in a brutal manmade storm – are we listening yet?? We rise, we must. Align to life-giving fuel, shift its extreme to the lever of unified balance and peace, at last, for light amidst the mad darkness.
Across the ocean from me in Ukraine, a butterfly flits its wings around the bright yellow petals of its homeland flower and none upon this planet can not feel its wind. The symbolism of this country’s revered crop, the sunflower, is not minimized or lost. The stories, events, are crushing, and tragically not the first time, or the second, the third, the fourth… But, in it, now, something more is happening, a precipice of momentum stirred, mobilizing. Its energetic wave a bruising tsunami to our sleeping centers.
All are witness, in some way, as the harsh hand of war delivers its careless blows (again). Its cost steep. But in the collateral of its smoke – and fears – something quivers, rising in collective human heart and spirit – despite all. And, because of it. Humanity’s poetry lived alight.
We have arrived here. Our own defining, heliotropic wake up. The four lane road of illusion between the faces, all needing the light. Facing it, and its sustenance, together.
I hope.
~ PART TWO ~
( more serious-er )
I feel a lot of things, and this, I feel deeply. (Don’t we all?) I still find levity in moments of my day, my thoughts, gratefully. They are my tuning fork. But so are these surging waves of sensitive awareness. I continue to lean into the thirsty balance that levity quenches, tho I cannot help but recognize the intense history unfolding or its echoing replays, or to not write about it. It is significant, and belongs in the telling of our story. They simply can’t be bypassed with callouses of indifference, disconnect, or placating positivity. An elevated perspective of inclusivity galvanizes in this opening. The world gets meaningfully small at such times, and we remember that the oceans flow upon all of our shores. We are not exclusive to them, nor they to us.
There’s a bull(y) in the china closet of this, our world, busting all of our mother’s dishes, vases, picture frames, water glasses. Its brute isn’t new, but its emboldened charge is a stampede of awakening to all of our walls. Memories and ghosts are released from the shards of broken glass at our feet, repeating thing(s) that shouldn’t. Its gall and shock tempt hate and anger so easily, and tho safe in my little American home with my brigade of adorable cats, I am indeed angry. Angry at what is – has been – happening. I don’t want to be, and I don’t want to feed it, but acknowledging it helps me to source the galvanizing by its fuel. And, center it.
What I see, and sense, is a horror and responsibility as an alarm clock, breaking barbed wire boundaries around the globe in offering a new pandemic of global cooperation from those unleashed memories, the colorized videos and photos across our screens, beyond the hard monochromes of history. The virus of autocratic bullies to our lunch moneys dominates in the dark. We are just emerging from the exhausting global Covid bully that shook those lines loose, warming us up to this moment.
I’m trying to close this writing, but too many voices have something vital to say. Springsteen’s Jungleland plays on repeat in my head, lamenting the raw edges of life’s intensities and lessons in its haunting weave of lyric and music. Its final notes speak jagged truth to us tender chroniclers of them:
Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz
Between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy
And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a knife, they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland
Whew… piercing stuff right there. Life on planet Earth can be damn hard, and working it out takes all of our senses to do it meaningfully. Music certainly helps. And for me, yes, writing all the feels in conversation with the voices and memories we’ve arrived here with. Reflections of my father are perhaps some of the hardest to silence among these thoughts and not-so-far-away-after-all events. He was part of the Greatest Generation, flying B-17s over Germany in World War II as a young man. A navigator, and later a pilot and a Colonel in the Air Force. It became his life, as a leader and soldier for thirty-one years. But the years of World War II shaped him.
His stories potent, rich, personal, rooted deep in those annals and the profound life lived beyond it. His own father emigrated as a child from Poland with his parents, leaving the whole of their family behind. Knowing no one here, its culture or English language and but a pocket of money, they claimed their new country and built their lives in it (immersing English studies every night). It was a life sown from the rough tilled soils and seeds of commitment, determination. My dad carried that history in his bones. As a dedicated American, in a world at war, it spurred my father’s spirit for his heritage, I think, and knowing down there on the ground, as he flew, was family he would likely never meet.
He became a historian, receiving degrees in History and Political Science. His mind razor sharp, until the end, in profound reflection of life on this planet, his place in it, and perhaps that wise old sunflower who did his share of chasing the sun, filling up, and making his difference in life, to offer space and seasoned wisdom to the younger generations.
I spent some treasured, quality time with him in his last months, rich with that reflection. On several occasions as he was waking, I’d come into his room with his cup of coffee (black, with an ice cube to cool it), and glean a peak into the whispers of those nine decades of life. Two poignant mornings I remember clearly. My soldier father, long softened in his edges, laying on his side, gazing in his quiet to the rising sun beyond the window.
“Penny for your thoughts, Pop,” I smiled, setting his mug beside the bed.
“Ice cube?” He questioned in low morning voice.
“Of course,” I replied, his smile pensive, returning his gaze out the window.
We sat a few minutes, me perched on the bedside, stroking his shoulder in the morning’s peace, his thoughts here, but far away from this room. And then, “what are you thinking about, Dad?”
He breathed in softly, a tender wind in his exhale, eyes far beyond the window’s glass with his thoughts. “Bombs,” he said, “bombs.” Sighing softly, again, “do they every really hit their targets?”
My own breath caught in my throat. I dared not interrupt the cultivated space of truth permeating the room beyond the histories of its photos on the walls, his military memorabilia, awards, and gifts adorning his home. He often spoke that he was against war, but believed in fighting for a cause that was just. And he did, certainly in raising his family, but in three wars during his career. He spoke strongly about them, intelligently, from the mind of an experienced and well-studied historian, not always condoning their events, and, more notably, their human cost. In speaking of his pension, he was humbled in saying, “it’s because I lived.”
The simplest messages are often the most poignant. The power of his brevity grew greater as his last years passed. This day was honoring his arrival to this moment, its learnings, his place in the sun – although I don’t think he felt any nobility for it. Despite the blur in his aging physical vision, his insight within clarified. His elevated perspective, the flavor of life’s value here on this planet.
At various times, those final years, he intently shared a father’s guidance with me, his youngest daughter. Still brief, but clear, gentle, woven with wrinkles of love and living. An awareness of our choices, he wanted me to grasp, courage to push thru hardship – beyond contrived fears to our true happiness, fulfillment. This mattered to him. That we do know what it is inside, as he heard in its whispers those waning years. “Listen to them, Meggie,” he urged, “don’t miss out on what’s truly important.” This, he had learned, is what delivers our meaning. In a world where he made – and inherited – sacrifices to understand these truths, he had regrets. He wanted peace. Thru the aging eyes of experience, a father’s love to help his daughter’s recipe for happiness. And joy. My days in the sun.
In a morning that followed a week later, the old soldier spoke again. It was another bedside moment delivering his coffee (black, with an ice cube to cool it) as he woke, morning light spilling onto his face and thoughts, writing their conclusions in its reflection.
“Penny for your thoughts, Pop,” I sat, stroking again the shoulder that had carried so much for me.
A soft breath, pausing, and then, “war,” he sighed. Shaking his head, delicate white hair – once handsome black waves – tussled against the pillow. His hazel eyes tired, but awake, gazing forward, “there are no winners.”
It is said that sunflowers begin their day facing to the East, awaiting the sun’s rise on the horizon and its first drink of light. As the day progresses, the sun and its rays travel across the sky to the West, and with it follows the bright face of the sunflower.
(**Etch-A-Sketch Artist: Mary Farina)
