City Sunflowers – Country Sunflowers

December 10th, 2014

Sunflowers. They bring beauty, joy, nourishment and healing.  And their sacred geometry shows the infinity of life.

This sunflower grew in the hollow of an old dead tree, with its roots high in the air.  It grew at the Southern Wisconsin dairy farm where my Mother was born and my Aunt and Uncle still live.

Down the road, near where another Aunt lives was a field full of sunflowers.

These country sunflowers brighten the landscape with their always growing toward the east yellow heads.

They also grow in the front of my city house.  During the winter I toss bird seed sunflower seeds in my front garden. I love when the bright yellow gold finches come around to eat the seeds. And of course the bees and other insects are always around when they bloom.

These bees are only a few of the perhaps thousands or millions of insects that pollinated the inner city vacant St. Louis lot for a project called the Sunflower+ project.

A joint collaboration to not only beautify vacant spaces, but to heal by absorbing the toxins in the the soil.

10,000 sunflowers were planted in the long blocks of a  vacant area on Delmar Blvd. in St. Louis. The organic plantings used no herbicides, or insecticides.

There was beauty from bud, to flower, to seed.

The seeds were eaten mostly eaten by groups of birds ( a host of sparrows, a charm of finches, descent of woodpeckers, a flight of swallows, a murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows, a party of jays?).  Some of the seed was collected and hopefully will be planted next year.

Perhaps my favorite part of the sunflower is the arrangement of seeds in the interlocking spirals defined by the Fibonacci spiral. This geometric form is beautiful in itself, but is also symbol of infinity.  The number expression is phi, the golden ratio, which is an irrational number meaning it is a fraction that is never resolved. It goes to infinity.

Here is a fun way to see the Fibonnaci spiral in nature.  This Kahn Academy video shows this.  (The woman who created the video is a friend of my daughter-in-law’s family. She makes math fun.)

And of course like so many flowers, the mandala shape helps me feel centered and embraced by the wholeness (holiness?) of the circle.  With the sunflower, and other composite flowers with similar flower heads, the circle embraces the symbol of infinity.

COMING SOON – 100 Days for Mandalas will start a new session in mid January.  Watch for more info.

ENJOY & CREATE

A charm of finches