Seeking inspiration today I found it in this sunflower. Some may see it as all used up – petals lost, growth complete, all done, and so sad. But deep inside are seeds preparing for their journey to become something new again. The possibility of new life is within each seed and one sunflower can have 2,000 seeds! So. Much. Potential.

Those seeds are ripening but it will be risky for them to become all they were designed to be. Conditions must be just right for them to germinate and grow. Oh to be like the sunflower without a care in the world. It doesn’t worry what tomorrow will bring. It only gives forth thousands of seeds because that’s all it was created to do. Its petals fall leaving it in a seemingly sorry state but it’s not staring in the mirror recalling its former younger self.

We can learn a lot from watching a withering sunflower. A closer look brings understanding and we realize it’s not withering at all. It is going through every stage of its life with gusto and clarity.

Oh I need to learn this lesson. I contemplate those sunflower seeds and how painful personal growth can be. It reminds me of a quote by Anais Nin, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Every stage of life has risks and rewards. Like the sunflower we cannot hold onto our petals no matter how hard we try. Letting them go allows us to live the next phase of life with gusto and clarity. Those seeds are waiting to be allowed to germinate into lovely fresh and new flowers in the garden of life.

Imagine our seeds as encouraging words, a friendly smile, an open heart that shows kindness instead of hate and criticism. It is risky, to drop these seeds around us everywhere we go. They may be rejected or rebuked and that can hurt. They can also lie dormant and germinate at some later date in the hearts of the recipients. We never know for certain what happens to those seeds.

While conditions must be just right for our own seeds to ripen and germinate like the sunflower, we have unlimited numbers of them, but we do have limited time.

If you find yourself looking in the mirror remembering a time of prettier petals, remember the sunflower. We’re not used up. In our younger days we had few (if any) seeds, but with the passage of time our seeds are ripening.  Let’s scatter seeds everywhere, without concern for where they may land, germinate, or blossom.