Goodbye, sunflowers!

The wheel turns.

Lughnasad’s big, beautiful sunflowers have been picked over by the goldfinches, and now the squirrels have started biting them off and carrying them away. The plants are struggling to keep making flowers, but the wheel of the year keeps turning. Their leaves are dying, one by one, and the squirrels have fully embraced their role as agents of destruction. Even with no ripe sunflower seed-heads left to raid, the squirrels keep launching themselves into the tops of the plants and breaking the stems, determined to find and carry away one more blossom.

I found this infuriating until I stopped seeing it through the eyes of a protective gardener and began seeing it as a lesson in what “creation from destruction” really looks like. It’s just Mother Earth doing what She does; it’s not personal. That’s a surprisingly hard lesson for this gardener.