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.