By Hal Brown
The sunflower’s yellow color symbolizes vitality, intelligence, and happiness. The color yellow also traditionally symbolizes friendship.
Sunflowers also symbolize worship and faithfulness in various religions because of their resemblance to the sun, which is associated with spiritual knowledge and the desire to seek light and truth.
The Incas used sunflowers to symbolize the Sun God, and brought them to temples for worship. The priestesses also wore sunflowers on their garments and as crowns. Reference
Every year a resident where I live plants sunflowers in his plot in the corner of the resident gardens in the Portland, Oregon senior community where I live. This year someone at the landscape company where we purchase a truckload of topsoil for the use of our gardeners used soil that had a residue of pesticides in it. For some reason it didn’t effect the other garden plots but the sunflowers, planted from seeds, were very susceptible.
Usually the plants are prolific. They grow straight and tall, many a foot or more higher than the six foot maximum noted on the seed packet. They have giant flowers facing the street. This year they struggled to grow and early in the season only about a dozen limp stalks had emerged. As summer progressed more of them sprouted.
That they grew at all is a testament to nature’s drive to survive.
Instead of the usual annual glorious display they are struggling to stand straight and tall and greet the sun every morning with gleaming yellow flowers the size of dinner plates.
I call them the distressed sunflowers named after a beautiful poem about grief by Donald Hall, a former poet laureate of the United States. He wrote a this evocative poem after his wife, who was also a poet, Jane Kenyon died.
He wrote Distressed Haiku (full poem here):
None of the verses follow the haiku form, the Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world. The poem is about the natural world where death is inevitable so it fits that part of the definition of a haiku. The structure of the verses don’t meet the criterion. The poem is distressed as building blocks wrongly put together could be said to result in a structure that was distressed (an very unusual use of the word).
The message is certainly distressed in the sense that it means suffering and pain. Hall offers a double meaning of the word distressed, the haiku is distressed but so is the message of intense grief.
Here’s a video of Hall reciting the poem. He was a big Boston Red Sox fan which explains the last verse of the poem.
Those of us who have suffered though four years of Donald Trump have been on a symbolic and literal forced death march. I use the term deliberately thinking of the Bataan Death March where upwards of 18,000 prisoners died. We have experienced the foreshadowing of the death of American democracy. We have seen the literal death black citizens caused by racist police. We have seen the death of 200,000 Americans because of Covid-19. This is of course a number much larger than it would have been if Trump didn’t put his politics above caring for the health and safety of our citizens.
Then those of us living on the west coast had the wildfires and Portland where I live had the worst air in the world and Trump blamed it on poor forest management dismissing climate change as a cause.
And then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
Trump was delighted by this. He could barely contain his glee in his rally yesterday. You may have seen clips of this rally. I won’t post the video here but you can click this link to see it. It is beyond distressing.
The sunflowers, if they could react to this, would be more distressed. Beyond being distressed, they would weep if they could.
Yesterday's dairy was about our shared grief too: