Garden Mentors, Shining in Their Way

 

Sunflowers were in our imagination this year as we filled greenhouse trays with seeds. The infatuation paired nicely with our resolve to scale back on vegetables. Having finally comprehended that we aren’t growing to feed an army, we mentally allocated more space for flowers. We’ve added bees to the farmstead enterprise and they would certainly benefit from additional flora, and while we still had plenty of vegetables in mind for the season, the reapportionment of garden rows would better align with the fact that it is just the two of us and miscellaneous dinner guests consuming the harvest. We would still be over-supplied.

Sunflowers weren’t the only flowers we seeded. There was a floral diversity, but sunflowers were at the heart of our efforts. Lots of them. Lots of varieties of them. “Evening Sun,” “Chocolate Cherry,” “Earthwalker,” “Panache,” “Mammoth Grey Striped,” “Hopi Black Dye,” “Short Stuff,” among others. There are, perhaps, a hundred of them now transplanted into rows - a number to rival the tomatoes.

But why? 

To be sure, they are striking in their Seussian quirkiness. They stretch and sprawl and tower above it all. We like the fact that they reseed themselves and return, year after year. Presently, we like their resplendent mindfulness of the people of Ukraine as they reel under the onslaught of murderously colonizing tyranny, but their hapless plight couldn’t have been on our minds when we ordered the seeds. Sunflowers are a food source not only for humans but pollinators alike - an adequate justification even if there were no others. They are heliotropic - meaning they seek the light - which might be inspiration enough in this shade-throwing world. Too many of us politicians, preachers, commentators and citizens behave in ways betraying too much affinity for the night.

But surely there is something more.

I rather think, in addition to their other virtues, our enthrallment has something to do with the sunflower’s unabashed, full-throated but unpretentious openness. Their face is like an open hand - petals extended and exposed without precaution. There is no timidity, simply the forthright precocity that seems to say, “Here I am. Welcome.” 

Early in life we are commonly taught, “Don’t talk to strangers” - wise counsel for vulnerable children - but unfortunately too few of us outgrow the caution. I'm not immune.  More times than I want to admit I "pass by on the other side of the road" like the foils in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.  The result, of course, is a collective of adults malnourished by sameness and suffocated by a seduction of safety that is neither tenable nor safe.

The sunflowers, by contrast, are unperturbed and unprotected. They are simply open. There is no artifice or opposition; simply the uninhibited, fully exposed offer of themselves to the sun…and beyond. 

In brightness. In beauty. In seed. In stately grandeur.

A face, fully offered. A hand, open wide and hospitably proffered. Content to be, or be given. And received.

Whimsically, winsomely open.
Turning toward the light.

We could do worse by way of mentors.

Blessedly in the Midst of It All

 It was, ostensibly, to enjoy the wildflowers.  We had spent the better part of the day working companionably outdoors – Lori supporting the burgeoning tomato bushes, while I mowed the grass.  And, indeed, as I had trimmed the path around the prairie, near the apiary, and then back around toward the house, the eruption of wildflowers had truthfully caught my attention.  

Finishing, then, the more detailed grooming, we boarded the utility cart for a look around.  The day had been sunny and blue, with cottony tufts of intermittent clouds; warm but not hot, with gentle breezes replacing the blustery winds of recent weeks.  It had been pleasant enough and satisfying work of the sort that makes for easy sleep and contented dreams.  

And as we crept our way around the pathways, the wildflowers were truly joyful – bergamot and blackeyed Susans, sunflowers and verbena, along with others whose names I need to learn.  The bees should be very happy at all the culinary options.

But as satisfying as was the ride – as lovely as were the flowers – the richer, still lovelier comprehension, was the sense of awe-filled appreciation that this is the anchoring place of our lives.  Yes, we have brought our hands and our souls to this place; yes, we have broken and sowed, we have planted and opened; yes, our fingerprints are here.  But I will be so bold as to assert that our efforts have served to magnify rather than stifle the personality of this piece of earth.  We have resisted the arrogance of forcing it to be something that it’s not, but have endeavored to hear its voice and amplify it.

And along the way it has nourished us.  I’m speaking of more than the garden and the orchard.  These several acres have fed more than our bodies.  It has enlarged and enriched our understanding of self, grounded our relationship to the “moreness” of creation, and humbled our assumptions surrounding our place in the world.  We are, to put it simply, simpler, and richer.  We are increasingly shed of our presumptions and pretensions – learnings, the irony of which are not lost on me this “Independence Day” weekend.  

Amidst a holiday that has come to be a self-indulgent bath in self-adjudged exceptionalism – that we, out of all the nations of the world and history, have managed to get it “right”; or at the very least, are the best among the alternatives (an argument that is at once gratuitously delusional and aspirationally pathetic) – we alternatively take a moment to admire a wildflower, pluck a wild blackberry and giggle at the burst in our mouths of its undeserved sweetness, and simply give thanks not for any possession of it, but for the generosity it unself-consciously tips our way.  

The celebration around the farmstead this weekend, then, is not about “rockets red glare” or some faux narrative about religious freedom or the trumpeting of supposed high and noble ideals.  Those, after all, are mere self-congratulatory fictions we perpetuate in order to elevate our national ego and sell more firecrackers and bottle rockets.  Having forsaken the beauty of community and the mechanics of cooperation, we collectively are left to settle for the fetish of "independence", a hollow and terminal alternative.  

Our celebration, instead, will seek to be a quiet and grateful wonder at the privilege of belonging - that we are a petal on a flower on a stem on a root in a soil that is no respecter of boundaries or borders; partners as busy contributing as receiving; speakers, but mostly listeners to the rustling, the stirring, the emerging and the blooming.  

And as darkness closes the day, "oohing" less at the fireworks in the sky than the fireflies in the field, we give


thanks that we get to be connected to - interdependent with - it all.