Sunflowers
Portola Valley, CA 20 September 1999
The sun is beginning to break through the morning mist. All the sunflower blooms are dead now. Their main stems have broken under the weight of the dead sunbursts. Each one the same. There are so many splendid corpses in the garden this time of year! Their splendor, not just in memory, but also in a kind of noble adherence to their fundamental natures. As if they are saying, this decay, this ending, this humbling piece of our existence, this too is as unspeakably beautiful as our first promises in the springtime.
There is so much beauty in the world. In a sense that’s all there is in the world – beauty. Ugliness, dreariness – all the unfortunate ways I choose to arrange the world – all this creates a vacuum, an absence of beauty. When I am most like me, I am more like all the rest of creation than I am different. Maybe that is why complete self-acceptance is so difficult. Maybe it is because of the loss attached. Maybe it is about what the ego has to ultimately give up – its tenacious grip on differentiation without really knowing individuation.
Important distinctions here. Differentiating myself is a process of defining me in opposition to the world around me. How am I unique? In what ways am I distinct and clearly bounded? Where do “I” end and the rest of the world begin? All these are about difference, about differing, about opposing. It’s a crucial developmental phase, but left to its own devices it will continue to run amok. In some ways it already has for me. So much of my life has really been about not being like my parents. Not opposing them, but in living my life in such a way that I could be as unlike them as possible. An incredibly pathetic and extended adolescence!
I have this sense that becoming an individual is a much more dynamic process than differing from others. Creating myself as an individual means in some ways to, means to what? Start over. Creating my own sense of self means to take into my life what is authentic and what resonates and is somehow true for me. It is not about being same or different. Those categories have no content in the self. They only have meaning to the ego – to the splinter that believes it is the tree.
Creating myself means to be in the beauty of the world, to take in the beauty of this self. It isn’t the beauty of Narcissus. This kind of beauty is the splendor that comes from seeing the world, and then seeing myself as complete, as perfect. Just as there is perfection for the sunflowers outside my window. They are no less perfect in death than the hummingbirds are in their magnificent display of divine energy. The beauty – not the devil – is in the details. In the smallest and most humble facets of the world and in myself.
If all this is true, and I sense that it is, it means that for me to really create myself, I have to own my ego in all its petty puffery. I have to own the pride I feel in accomplishments that may not have been entirely my own. I have to own the shame for the things I have done that may not have been all that honorable. I have to own the incompleteness in my life no less than the perfection.
Completion is perfection. The self – my self – began complete and always remains complete. The work is in letting go of the different and embracing what is not. All the sunflower blooms are dead now. The main stems have broken under the weight of the dead sunbursts. Each one the same…