Girasole: Sunflower

As I finished the last few pages of a humorous/serious memoir about a man who dramatically changed his lifestyle and location from a high-speed Los Angelino to a Tuscan, I was caught up in his description of the beautiful sunflowers that bloom in that part of the world.  Girasole, the Italian word for sunflower, means turn to the sun. Our English word sunflower could use some editing. The Italian word adds the image of movement and conjures up visions of thousands of sunflowers slowly turning their heads to soak up the life-giving rays of the warm Italian sun.  Sunflowers move and turn. This movement is not an act of volition.  There is something in their nature, their flower genetics that programs them to seek the sun for nourishment.  It’s their natural path, their destiny you might say: to spend their lives pointed towards the warmth and light of the sun. Sunflowers does not struggle with doubts or worries.  They do not try to figure out alternate pathways to maturity, or deny their imprinted patterns.  The sun attracts them and sends an unseen but strong message deep inside them and they follow.  They cannot turn away.

What about us human-type flowers as we seek out light and warmth? As we aspire to grow and flourish?  Could we use the metaphor of the sun and the sunflower to teach us something simple yet essential about our ability to deepen our understanding of the mystery of our relationship with the Holy?

If I think of my soul as a sunflower, I can imagine the feeling of this same attraction, this pull towards the life-giving light and energy that invokes our Creator’s essence.  Unlike the sunflower, I have the element of choice that always enters the picture.  I may feel this inner compulsion to turn toward God, but it sometimes wars with other feelings and choices. My own sunflower-type of turning is not inevitable or automatic.

I consider once more this beautiful Italian word, girasole—Turn to the sun. I look at pictures of huge fields of sunflowers that grow and ripen here in Texas in response to the seasons’ flow, filled with row after row of hundreds of flower heads nodding towards the sun. The fake sunflowers that sit in a vase in my office- well they are beautiful, but they do not turn and greet the sun. They have beauty, but no movement to add the energy that the genuine sunflowers possess.

I catch an inkling of a deeper, older lesson from the sunflowers.  Despite the whole idea of our human ability to turn away from our Creator, the inner God-inspired sunflower DNA does surely reside here, within me, within each one of us.  I may turn away, but in the turning, I am acknowledging that there is something there to be turned away from —  that part of us that syncs with God, that recognizes from whence we come, and where we will find that divine spark, the divine connection and the source of growth. The part of us that is truly a piece of our Creator resides within our unlikely hearts.  It is there, in the action, the turning, where the power is released and the ineffable happens.  Unable to be fully expressed, it is known deeply within me. There is a sacred mutuality in my relationship with the Holy. My nature calls to God and God’s calls to me.

The sunflower brightness of God is always there, living in me–an inner recognition that transcends words or even fully formed feelings, a deep affirmation of where a vital life lies, where growth will happen, and where my destiny will unfold. We are God’s own sunflower people, yes we are.

O God of the Sunflowers and of me.  You shine, day after day, minute by minute, sending out your energy and life and spirit-laden food that feeds my deepest, most inner parts.  Help me to turn towards you more deliberately, more completely, and more wholly as we share life and energy back and forth, growing and changing and finding beauty in our sunflower-shaped destiny.

Reflection Questions:

There may be times in your life when you have turned away from God’s light and energy, and times when you have turned towards it.  Take some time to reflect on those times, and what you learned from them.

What spiritual practices help you to access God’s Presence and Power in helpful ways?