Wabi Sabi Sunflowers

room to room
we take them with us
the last sunflowers

Presence, May 2017

first freeze
a field of sunflowers
eclipsed

Wild Plum, 6/17

We love sunflowers at our house.  Kevin grows them in the raised beds in our front yard and we enjoy sitting on the porch, watching the birds and bees and butterflies flit among them.  He cuts them and brings them in the house where they bow their heads and drop their pollen on the furniture.  But we don't mind.  Last summer, however, we didn't have any sunflowers so we went without until early autumn when Kevin brought me a bouquet from the grocery store.  We loved them so much that we took them with us from the bedroom to the living room to the dining room so we could enjoy every minute we had with them.  

This is the essence of wabi sabi, an aesthetic of Japanese art that people write essays and whole books about.  Simply and simplistically put, wabi sabi refers to beauty that is imperfect and impermanent.  Beauty that is fleeting, that is passing even as we notice it. A beauty that carries a hint of melancholy with it. 

My other sunflower haiku was written when I was driving to a women's retreat held by my church, The United Church of Granville, in November of 2016.  I passed a farm.  Farm house on the right.  And on the left, a whole row of sunflowers that had been blackened by the first hard freeze of the year.  I didn't stop to take a photo, because one doesn't usually photograph dead flowers, but the silent sunflowers, all drooping heads facing left, made an impression on me.  This was beauty in imperfection.  Beauty that has already passed.  The bones of beauty still standing.