this week: a sunflower grows from a sh*tpile
For months, I watched as what appeared to be a volunteer sunflower grew from a giant pile of manure in our pasture. It was thick and green and resolute, a sturdy teenager of a plant. I didn’t show it much curiosity—I may have tossed some water on it once, but other than that I did nothing but casually hope it might bloom someday.
What I did do was add shit to the pile. Every day we fill a wheelbarrow with cow shit and straw. Though we add to it daily, it seems to grow slowly since everything settles and breaks down, transforming from shit to manure.
This sunflower (likely started as a seed dropped by a bird) feasted on the nitrogen in the shit pile and grew to be monstrous—our own version of a roadside attraction. When friends come over they crane their necks and take pictures.
She’s a tall, unruly beast who towers over humans, lifted even higher by the 4-foot pile of shit that serves as our platform, and she’s another example of what it means to be be resilient as hell: to make a home where you’ve been left, and then proceed to thrive on your own terms.
I left home for a few days, and when I returned, she was beginning to look spent.
I had planned to make an oracle card and to name it: Sunflower growing from a shit pile—an image that might speak to the connection between excrement, transformation, and beauty, i.e. how the hardest stuff can change us in ways that ultimately sustain us. However, when I finally sat down to make the card, I found that I was less interested in the shit pile, more interested in the sunflower’s ongoing transformation from object of beauty to source of nourishment.
The sunflower looks tired to me in this stage, but I know that soon all her petals will fall away, her seeds will mature, and she’ll be bursting with nourishment and attract all the little birds.
Eventually, she too will be compost. First her leaves will break down. Her stalk and disc will retain their structure for a long time, but eventually they’ll compost too.
In considering her as an oracle deck symbol, I ask:
When are we at our most essential? (Or, maybe a better question: What is essential about the stage of life we’re in?)
What does it mean to be consumed?
What does it mean to be spent?
How do we discern between being a source of nourishment for others and a source of nourishment for ourselves?
When is the former a source of joy? When is it too much?
Perhaps I’m working towards another iteration of the card: Spent Sunflower. Apparently my work is just beginning.
I really loved this piece, Jen. What it made me think of is how we tend to focus on everything negative, or everything we perceive that is going wrong in our lives, and we fail to see so many times how beauty or goodness came actually come about from the ugly or the painful. I have been experiencing this myself, and by the way, I have some pretty amazing sunflowers growing in my back garden as well. It's crazy how we don't actually plant these, but they come up, as if embodying hope, faith, in their spectacular bright yellowness, their optimism, their grace and happiness. They look like what happiness must look like if you could just envision it pure and by itself. And so they're like a juxtaposition of everything horrible that is going on all around us, all around the world. There is so much pain that so many people are experiencing in this one moment I'm writing this to you, and at the same time.
Those sunflowers. From the shit.