Sunward
For a music video version of this vignette, click here.
This season, sunflowers line the sidewalks and the roads. Some are picture-perfect with unmarred and vibrant yellow petals. Some of them are not, with brittle brown centers and only a few sad threads of past petals. Some are supermodels; some are bedraggled mothers wondering if they can put on the other pant leg.
They turn their hopeful faces to the sun and they follow it. They do this despite two things: the state of those faces, and the circumstances of the place where they are growing. They are tall and thin which often means delicate, but they are nothing like delicate.
In tiny little movements too small to see while driving by, they choose to seek the radiation that could wither them. They take the shade when it comes from the clouds and they absorb the heat even when it’s too much in mid-afternoon.
They aren’t out there with drooping heads wishing they had landed in a better patch of dirt and they don’t turn away when they’re broken. They don’t stop seeking the light when they are bruised or wrinkled or older than their neighbors by a few weeks (decades, in human terms). They follow the sun with a patience, reverence, and simplicity that is achingly hard to achieve as a human who has the freedom to move anywhere I wish.
In a matter of weeks, the nighttime temperature will plunge its fists into freezing and they will be gone shortly after. Maybe something with that much courage can’t live for very long.
They cast themselves into the open and at the mercy of the elements, and they do so with confident faces. I can’t always do it like they do. More often than I’d like, I turn it away from the frightening brightness that would eventually allow me to grow. I forgo things as elemental as the sun in my growth process, but I choose not to give them the full force of my yes. I choose instead to hide, to droop, to not make the attempt to push up from the rocky soil in the first place.
I wish I had the strength to say yes to all the things that could burn me. It’s possible every now and then, but not in the same blazing and fleeting way as these sunflowers: fervently magnificent in their hopefulness.
