Catching the Sun

They capture and hold the sun within, these buttery yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Like sunflowers, their capitulum appears to be a single flower, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

The blooms are little earthbound suns on stems, and they dish out light as if it is warm honey. All the other garden flowers around them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind. Bumbles and bees adore them.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures do from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world, and I think about the injustice and suffering and deliberate cruelty rampant everywhere. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to breathe in light and send joy and comfort back out into the great wide world.

I wish I could take in light and store it as flowers do in summer, but I haven't a clue how to go about it. Perhaps all that is required is to stand in the garden with my face to the sun. I could become a garden myself. Now there's a thought.