Wild and Unruly. Yep. That Would Be Us...

I almost chopped down the giant sunflowers that were coming up as volunteers outside the bakery door to the backyard.

They are wild. Unruly. No giant picturesque flower heads here. Dozens of happy little flowers that great the sun, shine happily a day or three, then dry into a scratchy mass of mess. These are not the sunflower seeds we like to snack on.

The plants tower over me as I exit the sliding glass door to the yard.

Maggie caught me as I mentioned my desire to tidy things up. She reminded me we like unruly wild things.

What a girl.

So the scratchy mass of messy, over ten foot tall plants grow outside the door. And gift me daily as they gift many of God's little creatures with their treats.

Some days my meditation/prayer moment consists of pausing for five or ten minutes at the bakery door. I watch the gold finches, usually a pair, male and female, sometimes three or four, come to feast on the nodding, dried up heads of tiny little nutritious seeds. They land on the head, it bobs a couple times. Sometimes more if it is windy. Upside down, their little beaks bob quickly back and forth, pulling out the seeds that are worthless to me.

Except for them.

The lemon curd yellow bellies bounce. I wonder that God gave me Maggie to help me remember the important things.

PS During one of my meditation/prayer moments the other day as I attempted to still my mind and be in the glorious gift of my life at the moment, I noticed a cloud of what appeared to be monarch butterflies sipping from the nectar of the volunteer hot pink zinnia blooming her heart out by the dead damson plum tree that no matter how much water, still couldn't survive the stress of our extra hot summer. And tiny yellow sulfur butterflies danced around the patch of tiny yellow flowers that will turn into godforsaken awful, horrible goatheads if I neglect to tend to them....And another couple of varieties of butterflies danced with the goldfinches, swallowtails, a brown and gray variety that looked like bark and maybe something else. The dove flew here and there, a loose chicken scratched around the edges.

PPS other kids, not mentioned: I will try to squeeze in some mention of the significant ways you have been speaking spiritual truths to me this summer. Wow. Feeling stressed. Upheaval and concerns and distractions that attempt to drag me away from my true center. But somehow they bring me back, even if for just a moment at a time...