Sunflower And Sun Quotes

despite knowing they won’t be here for long they still choose to live their brightest lives - sunflowers

He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

Never look directly at the sun. Instead, look at the sunflower.

My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to the sun.

Sunflowers end up facing the sun, but they go through a lot of dirt to find their way there.

what is it with you and sunflowers he asks i point to the field of yellow outside sunflowers worship the sun i tell him only when it arrives do they rise when the sun leaves they bow their heads in mourning that is what the sun does to those flowers it's what you do to me - the sun and her flowers

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

Because somehow, the sun rises each day. Emerging from the horizon, brighter and more beautiful than the previous day. You'll rise from the horizon too, learning to trust again. Learning to love again. Learning to heal. You'll emerge so bright that the haters will be blinded. And darling, you'll be the sun then, bright and beautiful, but they won't be your sunflowers.

When someone shows me even the tiniest bit of kindness my entire soul still twists towards them. A sunflower searching for the sun. A hatchling keening for its mother.

There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun.

despite knowing they won’t be here for long they still choose to live their brightest lives - sunflowers

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs.

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller's journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond Someone to hear me there

I don't think there's anything on this planet that more trumpets life that the sunflower. For me that's because of the reason behind its name. Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun. During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky. A satellite dish for sunshine. Wherever light is, no matter how weak, these flowers will find it. And that's such an admirable thing. And such a lesson in life.

look at its shape, with vibrant yellows and oranges, a sunflower can brighten your day...it's as if it is smiling like a happy face painted on the sun...so if you do only one thing all day, let it be to smile, so you can brighten the day of others around you, just like the sunflower

Once upon a time there was a poor child with no father and no mother everything was dead and no one was left in the whole world. Everything was dead and it went and searched day and night And since nobody was left on the earth it wanted to go up to the heavens and the moon was looking at it so friendly and when it finally got to the moon the moon was a piece of rotten wood and then it went to the sun and when it got there the sun was a wilted sunflower and when it got to the stars they were little golden flies stuck up there like the shrike sticks 'em on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back down to earth the earth was an overturned piss pot! and was all alone.

The head of all flower heads is one flower; the sunflower in the sky, that gives the others vivid color stemming from the inside.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body.... Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them. Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Top-heavy sunflowers droop, their leaves baked golden by the August sun.

my words are like the sun and Cassidy is like a sunflower after ten straight days of rain.

despite knowing they won't be here for long they still choose to live their brightest lives -sunflowers

The Sunflowers Come with me into the field of sunflowers. Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines creak like ship masts, their green leaves, so heavy and many, fill all day with the sticky sugars of the sun. Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends; they have wonderful stories of when they were young-- the important weather, the wandering crows. Don't be afraid to ask them questions! Their bright faces, which follows the sun, will listen, and all those rows of seeds-- each one a new life!-- hope for a deeper acquaintance; each of them, though it stands in a crowd of many, like a separate universe, is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy. Come and let us talk with those modest faces, the simple garments of leaves, the coarse roots in the earth so uprightly burning.

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.

Because I can see people’s souls sometimes when I draw them, I know the following: Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there’s hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

Like sunflowers, no matter where they are planted turn towards the sun, I too began turning in the direction that nourished me.

Sunflowers know the secret of life is to follow the sun.

Sunflowers, Not Facing the Sun (A Poem) I stand tall As gracious as one could be Blooming to my best As slender as it touches my being Everyone else is facing the sun Bending towards its unfathomable galore They and I are both undoubtedly Grown on the benevolence of life’s essence The brighter side mercilessly feeding desires unbound By daunting the “courage to know” with each spin Though, I am not able to face the sun the way they do Yet, I learn from the knowledge bred within me Beyond achievement markers, but an adverse ability An opportunity to exercise my special self From the cherubic attire of my blessed soul To the unfathomable mystery the drape of this world hides That I, by not facing the sun Hunt the gems in the milieu of the human existence

Who says what's magic and what isn't?' said Hal. 'There's only what is. You wouldn't call it magic when a sunflower turns its head to follow the sun, because there's an explanation for it. In a way, everything is magic.

The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.

At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wine-glasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. (Season of Disbelief)

In my yellow room, Sunflowers with purple eyes stands out on a yellow background. They bath their stems in a yellow pot, on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold. And in the morning upon awakening, from my bed, I imagin that all this smells very good. Oh yes! He loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from holland. Those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul That abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth. When two of us were together in arles, both of us mad and at constant war over the beauty of color, me, i loved the color red, Where to find a perfect vermilion? He traced with his most yellow brush on the wall, Suddenly turned violet. Je suis saint esprit Je suis sain d'espri. Paul gauguin, 1894.

The happiest field in all the harvest is the field of sunflowers at their peak. Drinking the rays and dancing in the breeze. The saddest field is the same field, six weeks later. Drunk on the sun and burnt with shame, they drop their heads to hide their mane.

Girls compete against each other, like the sunflowers my mom tried to plant in her garden, the ones that never grew. She planted them too close together and they all vied for the same sun, choked green stems and sulking yellow faces. Flora was wilting, and I was about to be in bloom.

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

despite knowing they won’t be here for long they still choose to live their brightest lives -sunflowers

Bibliotropic,” Hugh said. “Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.

A stranger to compliments, she turned her face to this one, like a sunflower worshipping the sun. “Thanks.

She's like the sunflower. She'll find the sun no matter how much darkness other people try to put her in.

All they were - all they had ever been - was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It’s what the sunflowers do. —Helen Keller

It is hard to remember the day it is today For days that don’t shine Sun-Day is hard to forget in my memory For days that sunflowers

Without the tender rays of your love, I am nothing but a withered sunflower.

The sun will rise again!

A wise quote can only change a wise man! Therefore, wise sayings are for the wise men, not for the fools! The sunflowers turn their face toward the Sun, the fools, toward the darkness!

He had truly meant to pay her a compliment when he told her how different she was from “those silly young noblewomen,” had truly believed that she would be flattered to be thought extraordinary from her sex. It was men like him who had made her into a symbol, had put her into this impossible position. But, in a way, that made the task easy. She knew exactly what she needed to say and do, and she even enjoyed the challenge of playing the role of his ideal: She was worthy only insofar as she oriented herself to men, like a sunflower adoring the sun.

Dolphins are sunflowers of the water. They adore the Sun, they love the ocean and are kind to the land. They remind us to stay playful, keep our inner child safe and stand by loved ones.

Being born is like this: The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun. The wheat is ripe. The bread is eaten with sweetness. My impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees

For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter.

MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.

As the days grew longer, and the last few touches of frost were melting, in the haze of dappled morning sun, children peered into the yellow window-box, long shadows dancing around their feet, their voices echoing.

For you, a thousand times over." "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors." "...attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun." "But even when he wasn't around, he was." "When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing." "...she had a voice that made me think of warm milk and honey." "My heart stuttered at the thought of her." "...and I would walk by, pretending not to know her, but dying to." "It turned out that, like satan, cancer had many names." "Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her." "The first time I saw the Pacific, I almost cried." "Proud. His eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving end of that look." "Make morning into a key and throw it into the well, Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly. Let the morning sun forget to rise in the East, Go slowly, lovely moon, go slowly." "Men are easy,... a man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand... well, God put a lot of thought into making you." "All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman." "And I could almost feel the emptiness in [her] womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from [her] and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child." "America was a river, roaring along unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins. If for nothing else, for that I embraced America." "...and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan." "...lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty." "...sometimes the dead are luckier." "He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air around him." "...and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. 'You're still the morning sun to me...' I whispered." "...there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eys of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is.

the Court of King’s Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.

I tuck the sunflower stem behind her ear, reveling in the juxtaposition of two ostensibly beautiful things. One forged by the earth, destined to chase the sunlight forever. The other the sun itself: warm, bright, and the center of my fucking universe.

To those who may have wisely kept their fancies within the boundary of the fields we know it is difficult for me to tell of the land to which Alveric had come, so that in their minds they can see that plain with its scattered trees and far off the dark wood out of which the palace of Elfland lifted those glittering spires, and above them and beyond them that serene range of mountains whose pinnacles took no colour from any light we see. Yet it is for this very purpose that our fancies travel far, and if my reader through fault of mine fail to picture the peaks of Elfland my fancy had better have stayed in the fields we know. Know then that in Elfland are colours more deep than are in our fields, and the very air there glows with so deep a lucency that all things seen there have something of the look of our trees and flowers in June reflected in water. And the colour of Elfland, of which I despaired to tell, may yet be told, for we have hints of it here; the deep blue of the night in Summer just as the gloaming has gone, the pale blue of Venus flooding the evening with light, the deeps of lakes in the twilight, all these are hints of that colour. And while our sunflowers carefully turned to the sun, some forefather of the rhododendrons must have turned a little towards Elfland, so that some of that glory dwells with them to this day.

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a “spirit world” than a sunflower following the Sun in it’s course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.

Lollipops and raindrops Sunflowers and sun-kissed daisies Rolling surf and raging sea Sailing ships and submarines Old Glory and “purple mountain’s majesty” Screaming guitar and lilting rhyme Flight of fancy and high-steppin’ dances Set free my mind to wander… Imagine the ant’s marching journeys. Fly, in my mind’s eye, on butterfly wings. Roam the distant depths of space. Unfurl tall sails and cross the ocean. Pictures made just to enthrall Creating images from my truth Painting hopes and dreams on my canvas Capturing, through my lens, the ephemeral Let me ruminate ‘pon sensual darkness… Tremble o’er Hollywood’s fluttering Gothics… Ride the edge of my seat with the hero… Weep with the heroine’s desperation. Yet… more than all these things… Give me words spun out masterfully… Terms set out in meter and rhyme… Phrases bent to rattle the soul… Prose that always miraculously inspires me! The trill runs up my spine, as I recall… A touch… a caress…a whispered kiss… Ebony eyes embracing my soul… Two souls united in beat of hearts. A butterfly flutter in my womb My lover’s wonder o’er my swelling The testament of our love given life Newly laid in my lover’s arms Luminous, sweet ebony eyes Just so much like his father’s A gaze of wonder and contentment From my babe at mother’s breast Words of the Divine set down for me Faith, Hope, Love, and Charity Grace, Mercy, and undeserved Salvation “My Shepherd will supply my need” These are the things that inspire me.

You remind me of sunflowers leaning out and so I know the sun is shining, of walking barefoot on the grass and feeling the relief travel up my bones, of the wind hitting my face and clearing the clouds above my soul. You remind me of everything I feared would go bad yet turned out so good. And I thought I might remind you.

If all your dreams have broken and gone, if you feel isolated in your own private world, go out this minute and buy a sunflower. Place it on a sunny shelf, give it a little water every day – not too much – and as its big yellow face turns to the sun you will feel your lips lift in a smile knowing that you have learned the secret life of sunflowers.

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

To fill the days up of his dateless year Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere? For first of all the sphery signs whereby Love severs light from darkness, and most high, In the white front of January there glows The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose: And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness, A storm-star that the seafarers of love Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of, Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp; The star that Marlowe sang into our skies With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes; And in clear March across the rough blue sea The signal sapphire of Alcyone Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year; And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light When air is quick with song and rain and flame, My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower, My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower; Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire; Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone, A star south-risen that first to music shone, The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears Light northward to the month whose forehead wears Her name for flower upon it, and his trees Mix their deep English song with Veronese; And like an awful sovereign chrysolite Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night, The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars, A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars, The light of Cleopatra fills and burns The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns; And fixed and shining as the sister-shed Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead, The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere, That through September sees the saddening year As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name Francesca's; and the star that watches flame The embers of the harvest overgone Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon, Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras, The star that made men mad, Angelica's; And latest named and lordliest, with a sound Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round, Last love-light and last love-song of the year's, Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.

As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.

For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

I want to tell you what I think the sex act is. I think it is like a lovely piece of music, conceived quietly in a background of mutual affection and understanding, made possible by instincts which lean toward each other as naturally as the sunflower slowly turning its lovely face to the sun. I think it is an aria of the sex symphony; an aria which begins beautifully certain of its rightness, moves with that certainty to a distinct tempo of feeling, sings itself happily, steadily, working, working, to a screaming, bursting climax of indescribable beauty and rapture and then throbs, spent and grateful in a re-dedication for the next movement of its perfection.

Jobs went home early that day to mull over the problem, then called Ive to come by. They wandered into the garden, which Jobs’s wife had planted with a profusion of sunflowers. “Every year I do something wild with the garden, and that time it involved masses of sunflowers, with a sunflower house for the kids,” she recalled. “Jony and Steve were riffing on their design problem, then Jony asked, ‘What if the screen was separated from the base like a sunflower?’ He got excited and started sketching.” Ive liked his designs to suggest a narrative, and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.

Do not worry,” the Rebbe told me, or rather I told myself using the image of that aged Jew who was dressed as a rabbi. “Loneliness means not knowing how to be with oneself.” Of course, I do not mean to imply that a child of seven years can speak in such a fashion. But I understood these things, albeit not in a rational manner. The Rebbe, being an internal image, put things into my mind that were not intellectual. He made me feel something that I swallowed, in the way that a newly hatched eaglet, its eyes still closed, swallows the worm that is placed in its beak. Much later as an adult I began to find words to translate things that were, at that young age—how can I explain it?—openings into other planes of reality. “You are not alone. Remember last week when you were surprised to see a sunflower growing in the courtyard? You concluded that the wind had blown a seed there. A seed, though it looks insignificant, contains the future flower. This seed somehow knew what plant it was going to be, and this plant was not just in the future: although immaterial, although only a design, the sunflower existed there, in that seed, blowing in the wind over hundreds of kilometers. And not only was the plant there, but also the love of light, the turning in search of the sun, the mysterious union with the pole star, and—why not?—a form of consciousness. You are not different. All that you are going to be, you are. What you will know, you already know. What you will search for, you are already seeking: it is in you. I may not be real, but the old man who you now see, although he has my inconsistent appearance, is real because he is you, which is to say, he is what you will be.

Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness.

MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.

I know I will not find us lying beneath the stars. We won’t be walking through the sunflower fields. We won’t fall in love with the sun rise, or kiss in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll miss you, and then I’ll cry for you. And when I’ll miss you, I’ll look for you on my bookshelf. You’ll be there in between four hundred pages. Maybe covered in dust, maybe stained with tears, I’ll wipe it with my yellow t-shirt, The one I wore on October first. But no matter how much I cry, with a broken heart, on a Saturday night. I’ll grab the book close to my heart. Then I’ll close my hazy eyes and see you smile under clear sky. I’ll stay an old soul and you’ll stay my vintage dream. A dream that will bring me back to life like a fantasy novel, and break my heart like a dead poetry. I’ll open my eyes, the illusions will be destroyed. But no matter how much I cry. About you, I’ll never write. This isn’t our song. But years later, on a winter night, if ever, you’ll call it our song. Then believe me, in a blink, I’ll call it a love song.

The rapid growth of Message- combined with an outpouring of florists offering consultations in the language of flowers to the streams of brides Marlena and I turned away- caused a subtle but concrete shift in the Bay Area flower industry. Marlena reported that peony, marigold, and lavender lingered in their plastic buckets at the flower market while tulips, lilac, and passionflower sold out before the sun rose. For the first time anyone could remember, jonquil became available long after its natural bloom season had ended. By the end of July, bold brides carried ceramic bowls of strawberries or fragrant clusters of fennel, and no one questioned their aesthetics but rather marveled at the simplicity of their desire. If the trajectory continued, I realized, Message would alter the quantities of anger, grief, and mistrust growing in the earth on a massive scale. Farmers would uproot fields of foxglove to plant yarrow, the soft clusters of pink, yellow, and cream the cure to a broken heart. The prices of sage, ranunculus, and stock would steadily increase. Plum trees would be planted for the sole purpose of harvesting their delicate, clustered blossoms and sunflowers would fall permanently out of fashion, disappearing from flower stands, craft stores, and country kitchens. Thistle would be cleared compulsively from empty lots and overgrown gardens.

While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's memory eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high seas, and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it's gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun's so bright that the sunflowers don't know which way to turn, yes, over there, that's Esteban's village.

She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides. She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds. With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God. After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

If the sunflower could speak its feelings as we do, it too would no doubt claim that it is willing its face to turn to the sun.

surprising strength, this optimistic flower rises up from the ground, turning its petals toward the sun. It breathes life into all in its presence. Bright. Radiates happiness. Colorful petals and resilient roots. The sunflower gives others the encouragement to seek joy, even on the gloomiest days. Celebrate your power; it grows from that ever-positive light within you.

Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves.” They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her. “Where did you learn that?” I asked her. “From Emme-and-Emme.” Your father gave me a look. “That’s weird,” Polly said, bending down. “These two aren’t facing the sun. They’re facing away. They must be sick.” “Maybe they think there’s another sun,” your father said. Polly looked up in the sky. “That would be very bad,” she said. “Because then the sunflowers would keep turning and turning, and they would get a pain.” I

Knowing that R. L.’s death at nineteen is not his end, Mrs. O’Brien and Jack can trust the nuns. Those who live in the way of grace may die young. They may die horribly. But they never come to a bad end because death is not the end. We are quite a ways beyond Heidegger here. Whatever other influence he had on Malick’s vision, Malick doesn’t accept that death is the limit, that time has a final horizon beyond which the rest is silence. Beyond death there is reconciliation, reunion, hope. Beyond death, there are sunflowers. The sunflower is a perfect image for the way of grace. Its name is suggestive of heavenly glory. In color and shape, it is a reflex of the burning suns of what might be an infinite universe. Malick uses Hubble Telescope pictures of deep space, but one doesn’t have to have a telescope to see the glory shine. Suns grow in the backyard, if we our eyes are open windows. Sunflowers follow the sun through the day, the perfect botanical expression of the way of grace that receives the glory. It’s the perfect Heideggerian flower that never forgets Being. But Malick does something stunning with his sunflowers. The first shot of is a close-up of a single flower, as Mrs. O’Brien speaks of the way of grace. We can see others dancing in the wind behind, but we concentrate on this one. At the end of the film, the camera pulls back, a brilliant blue sky fills the top two-thirds of the screen, and we see a breathtaking field of sunflowers. Through the suffering and loss that the movie depicts, the single sunflower of grace blossoms into a field of sunflowers. It’s Job, surrounded by his second family that he can love. It’s Brothers Karamazov. It’s the Agnus Dei and all seeds that go into the earth to die, so they can produce fruit.

To pray,” he continued, “is so beautiful. It means looking to heaven and to our heart. We know that we have a good Father who is God.” Looking to heaven and to our heart. This brief definition of the meaning of prayer sums up the mind of the new pope, which moves from the most sublime things—heaven, the eternal, the absolute, the true, the good, the beautiful—to the most simple, down-to-earth things—the things in the human heart. The first is the realm that transcends all that we do, the realm that is not yet here but that we long for, hope for. The second is the realm of our most intimate privacy, the core of our being, the source of our identity, and of our hopes. And for Pope Francis, prayer connects these two realms. The furthest out, and the furthest in. And to pray, to bring about this “communion” between what is furthest out and furthest in, is radiant, he tells us. It is an aesthetic judgment. To pray, he is telling us, before it is good, or true, or effective, or powerful, is “beautiful.” And he says this because he knows the human heart, the human soul, is made to be drawn toward the beautiful, as a sunflower turns toward the sun, following it from dawn until dusk.

Whitman, you once told me, is democracy on the page, messy and imperfect as we are in real life, which gave you hope that we would one day make real life true democracy, ripe blossom, pollen dusting every moment and person, each scampering mote of light. This is why as you lay dying, I read “I Hear America Singing” and knew you heard every word and could feel my hand on yours though you were already moving toward other miracles than this life. A sunflower followed your motion and a yellow dog stood guard. You, who lived the notion that the sun belongs to each and every one, beggars, dreamers, kings, all. You who believed banks could have hearts, for god’s sake! You have left it to us, messy and imperfect as we are and will be, to keep to the work side by side and as long as it takes, all the while singing of miracles just as Whitman and you taught us to do.

what is it with you and sunflowers he asks i point to the field of yellow outside sunflowers worship the sun i tell him only when it arrives do they rise when the sun leaves they bow their heads in mourning that is what the sun does to those flowers it’s what you do to me - the sun and her flowers

They express it differently, but each of them look at me as if they’re a meadow of sunflowers and I’m their sun. Their devotion seeps into every little thing they do,

Seeing the sun in the midst of sunflowers and feeling their radiance add to your gaiety. (Journal: Professors Journal: Mentioned in about section) By theamitkumarswords

Come, come and sit beside me and watch the Sun and Sunflowers toast each other and perceive that peace is just a drink away from the eternity.

Sunflower seeds on their cushion lie in a pattern of interlacing circles, all in sober tones of gray that seem to repent the wanton flowering of summer. Jade green soybeans in bristly, dark-brown pods and rich yellow corn in faded husks. It is a near miracle to pull tapering orange carrots out of the ground or dark-red beets; sweet potatoes most of all, so varied in shape and size, of such a golden color. The slanting sun is warm, the sky above the tawny earth is of deepest blue. The gardener harvests much that was never planted.

L” energy is always within us, however, and we can become more aware of it not by trying harder but by slowing and quieting down to, as fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested, turn toward the mystery of our own nature the way a sunflower turns toward the sun.

Let me love you! Let us tend to our life like a flower, Tender, beautiful, without any conflict, Let us fill our senses with this flower, And put an end to every emotional conflict, Let our feelings be like the sunflower, Always thinking of and staring at the Sun, Let us radiate with the beauty of the sunflower, And allow our love to be our everlasting Sun, Let my every feeling rush towards you, Like the waves rushing to the shore, Then let me sink into you, And no more shall I ever seek any other shore, Let me be the song of the Summer joys, The song of happy brooks, the tender fluttering of flowers, Let me lend you all these Summer joys, And in you create my gardens of love and beautiful flowers, Let me share all my secrets with you, Like the wind that shares hers with trees, flowers and everything, Let me feel every part of you, And like the wind, cover you, your shadows and everything, Let me be the Moon that shines every night, Mild, faint, subtle, light; yet bright enough, To let me see you everywhere even in the darkness of the night, And in the day under the Sun too, because seeing you forever is not enough, Let me be that every reason that makes you happy, Then glide gently across the territory of your mind and heart, Let me be this feeling that always makes you feel happy, And then my love Irma, l shall let my feelings be a part of your heart.

I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do. Do cats pray, while they sleep half-asleep in the sun? Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street? The sunflowers? The old black oak growing older every year? I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not. While I was thinking this I happened to be standing just outside my door, with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not. I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate gold, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

The way the sunflowers turn to see the rising sun, and the way the moonlight shines upon the sleeping sea. Your presence seems to have a very similar effect on me...

The Provençal tomato is a thing of wonder--- it can be as small as a marble, large as a human heart, red like a valentine, yellow like a sunflower, pale green like a brand-new leaf, orange like the sun in a child's drawing. My favorite is the noire de Crimée, a tomato that's purply-olive, like seaweed seen through moving water.

God doesn’t love, men murder, and nature rains clean water down on the bloodied bodies, the sun bleaches their bones, a tree drops its leaves onto the unrecognizable face of someone’s daughter, the earth sprouts glorious sunflowers that feed on the purple flesh of disappeared women.