Wild Sunflower

If I could choose to be any living thing other than my sentient being, I would choose to be a sunflower. A sunflower is made up of to 2000 tiny flowers that join at the base to make it one. My cells also join to make this one me who sometimes acknowledges that she is, and was always, a part of so many.

After growing through lots of dirt, a sunflower blooms adapting herself to gaze at the sun wherever the sun goes across the sky, East or West. She does not look at the shade, very well aware that if she did, she may wither.

She lowers her head when the night challenges her; she puts up no big fight with nature. She waits. I also wilt in the darkness and I shut my eyes tight when I am dwelling in it until the sun prompts me to rise again, after twisting through the dirt while I do so.

Moreover, I want to be a wild sunflower, not a cultivated, refined and nurtured one that we often see with an impressive stalk of a stem and a large smiling head.

Those are the stable people that may fit to be the cultivated sunflower, the ones with one career path and one passion. They can flourish well individually under this one burning star, those strong stable people.

In the wild, sunflowers in a field have smaller heads and seeds and they branch out madly, they don’t choose one direction to bloom towards and they like to grow in numbers amongst each other. Raising and lowering their heads together.

I thought I was unable to find stability and that all the parental raising and studies, which tried to have me do exactly that, have all gone to waste… but now I know that I learned how to lose my ability to curb my vision towards one direction all day long. It wasn’t easy to twist my neck so often, but to stay still? That will never be me. I move with the sun across the sky and so I praise my wild restlessness.

Who is this sun, moving its’ fire across the sky in this luring manner that makes me twist my gaze towards it and only it all the time. It moves for me and with me.

Who are you, you, the source of my animation? You are to me so many people, so many other sunflowers or seeds and tiny flowers, or billions of stars that make many other suns to many other planets.

You are not one. You are them all.

_{Beisan A. Alshafei}

_{January 30th, 2019}