approaching mindfulness

Aug 27, 2019

A few summers ago a sunflower emerged in front of two weary, dilapidated sheds. It had pushed itself out between a crack of paving slab, and some scabrous weed.  I became curious about its supple, subtle, resilient growth. I delighted in its presence. Its proud, virulent spear of mantis green. It became the focal point of the garden.  

During my son’s 3rd birthday party the children, unbidden, gravitated to its ring-around presence.

It also came in handy for charting other significant milestones of growth.

It became part of the fabric of everyday life.

I was beginning to find that by simply documenting its slow growth, as it harbored in warm shades of summer light, it became an anchor for my own emerging – albeit inchoate – sense of mindfulness. It embodied stillness and rooted patience. It gave me some sense of what is meant by the unfolding of present moments.

Then I noticed a botanic sidekick emerging just outside the sunflower’s protective shadow. A small bedding plant, in full bloom.

This new presence somehow guided me to a sense of myself as a child. To a sense of how vulnerable I was.

Both sunflower and the bedding plant were coming to represent the idea of how we are seeds sown – scattered haphazardly – between cracks and scabrous weed, until, that is, we emerge into our own particular light.

I thought about how I too needed to be protected as a child, but also of how my parents had experienced their own vulnerability; how they had come from not the most auspicious of starts in life – not unlike the sunflower and the bedding plant. I thought of how we are all – in our present moments – a younger self; a still innocent self attempting to grow under the stern sun between the harsh spaces and the sometimes welcome – sometimes not so welcome – shades; of how we are still connected to the self that seeks and seeks to be sought. Seeks to be nurtured. Seeks to be seen. To be valued. To be loved. 

Lord, how we need to be loved.

Perhaps it is only through the prolonged noticing of things that we sow seeds of compassion towards ourselves before knowing how to extend it out towards others. Perhaps you are still that child. Perhaps you are still in the process of becoming. Perhaps in that process, you learn – oftentimes painfully – how to let go.

The sunflower and its sidekick did their best, regardless of the inauspicious start; regardless of their place in the prescribed order of things. The place where they grew had no effect on the vitality of their existence. All they needed was to be offered the active hope of being themselves. 

And so, through the rains of summer, 

and the hints of early autumn’s ‘mellow fruitfulness', 

the sunflower started to bloom.

Craning its neck toward the westward sun.

Slowly awakening…awakening slowly, out of its seemingly unwelcome home.

Until the storm came.

And my attention was diverted to other images of impermanence.

There was a sunflower. 

Then there was no sunflower.

Between existence and non-existence, there is a place of exploration that offers itself in a series of unfurling present moments that are each a new beginning.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning….

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot – Little Gidding