The Hairy Stem
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. — W. B. Yeats
I passed a sunflower today.
I stopped. Took pictures. Not just of the big yellow face everyone photographs — the petals reaching out like it’s trying to grab the sun. I photographed the stem. The not-yet-bloomed buds. The strange hairy texture on the stalk that nobody ever zooms in on.
And it hit me: if I only ever photograph the beautiful part, I miss what makes the whole thing true.
There’s nothing wrong with being drawn to the beautiful. That impulse is wired in. But the flower is not just the bloom. It’s the whole structure — stem, root, bud, petal. One continuous thing. And the parts that aren’t photogenic? They’re holding the whole thing up.
I wonder how many things in my life I’ve been framing as their best angle.
Relationships. Work. Myself. My faith. I find the part that looks like a sunflower face — open, warm, something worth showing — and I crop the rest out. I curate rather than see.
Sharp senses don’t just mean catching the beautiful things. They mean being curious about the hairy stems, too.
What if you zoomed out on the whole thing — not just the bloom? The awkward part of a friendship. The season of your spiritual life that feels stuck. The creative project that’s still a bud.
The garden isn’t just the blooms. It’s also the dirt, the watering, the waiting, the stems nobody shares.
Wow! You truly are considering the ant! This reminds me of an observation I had decades ago, when I was in a college course on entomology - the cockroach, which we revile for its filthy habits, is quite a beautiful creature - color, shape, etc. Another thing I learned in that class was that few cockroach species occur in dirty environments - most of them live in the wild, and some of those that occupy our homes in other parts of the world are beneficial, eating other insects that are pests. But all we see are the dirty ones.
About 20 years ago, I was part of an international writer's forum set up by HarperCollins. A Romanian posted a short story for critique. He apologized for his poor English (which was better than my Romanian!). His story was about a cockroach that lived in an apartment building, and every day (or night, as the case may be) when it prepared to hunt for food, it first climbed to a certain apartment where a middle-aged woman lived alone. She often nodded off at the kitchen table, resting her head on her hand. If she was asleep, the cockroach crept out, climbed onto her shoe, and stroked her ankle with its antennae. It had fallen in love with her. The story was absurd, but it was absolutely charming! Whodathunk one could root for a cockroach!
It is all a matter of perspective, isn't it?