Catching the Sun

Oh, how 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.

Little earthbound suns on stems, gerbera dish out light as if it is warm honey. They are the essence of summer, and all the other garden flowers behind them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying movement, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures must from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world beyond my windows. I think about the injustice and suffering in the great wide world, and I am sad, very sad. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in early summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to take in light and send a little joy and comfort out to others. 

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