Sunflower Komorebi
Hello Reader
On the cusp of August, and back from a week at summer camp, I find myself in that calm-state-before-autumn. I glance at the calendar, and I do see how few weeks remain. Yet somehow rather than feel frenzied about the pace of it all, I surrender to a deep enjoyment about how much I just won’t get done this summer. If you’re able to indulge it, it’s a form of giving up I highly recommend.
But that could be me being on the verge of 54, where none of the categories and urgencies seem to hold quite like they used to. And I can nearly hear the pines in my back yard say, “Well, it’s about time.”
Cheers,
Jennifer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Weekly Reflection 🌻
- Weekly Practice ✨
- Little Tender Things 🐝💚
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Sunflower Komorebi
Jennifer Ruth Keller
After a week away for summer camp, I head to the back corner of our yard to assess the sunflower patch. In early June, as their tell-tale leaf sprouts punched through caliche, I could tell we’d mis-estimated how many need seeds to put down in spring. Scattered seed from last year had done its job, and would have been sufficient on its own. But in the glee of spring planting, and our attempt to empty out our seed supply, we’d planted with abandon, letting our fingers dig little dips in the earth, to receive matte black kernels of possibility.
Now, in late July, the stalks press against each other, a mishmash of bloom sizes crowd the air and seek the sun in a non-uniform, but somewhat matching direction. The grove is dense enough, tall enough, to conjure a form of sunflower komorebi, the Japanese term for the play of sun within a tree, when light and shadow animates the dimness of a thicket of leaves and limbs.
A smoke haze hangs in the sky, comes and goes with every hour, our noses wondering what we’ll encounter any time we open a door. The blaze of green and yellow from the sunflowers suggests they’re oblivious to the smoke pall, that they stand in triumph and rising, the only task allotted them this hot season. Or maybe that’s me wishing for such a simple course of order, my only purpose to be bold color and sunward stretching.
Bees peruse the blooms, the canary yellow of the disk florets a tight blaze of clarity and specificity, a gathering of hundreds of distinct parts to make a cohering whole. The stalks and leaves all seem a bit haphazard, uneven, a kind of rustic melange of textures and imprecision. Juxtaposed with the finely packed detail of the blooms, the overall effect is one of surprise, a wonderful example of how a single being can, as Whitman would have it, contain multitudes.
And if sunflowers get to do that, then, I wonder, why not me?
WEEKLY PRACTICE INVITATION
The what: Let’s contain multitudes with acceptance.
The how: Over the weekend, or across the week, keep your eyes and heart open for a creature, or place, or being who strikes you as “containing multitudes,” and doing so without tension or contradiction.
Spend some unhurried time noticing all the features or facets of the being’s “multitudinous” character. Get curious. Ask questions. Muse, and wonder. Notice, and allow. Maybe, celebrate the complexity + coherence of this being!
Then: borrow a wee, ripe bit of that noticing, and allowing, and every-so-gently transfer it to yourself or someone you love. Allow, even accept, the multitudinous facets as they are, however they are. Even if it’s only for a few breaths.
Play with it, repeat, see if those few breaths can become five, or ten, or perchance a few glorious minutes of peace.
LITTLE TENDER THINGS
We see you bee,
visiting giant bloom
after bloom, flitting
and whirring about the
anthers, your pollen
harvest a transfixing
bounty of
motion and hue.
