Tag: dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close
   emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,
   had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—
   innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful
   face.
~Walt Whitman “The First Dandelion”

As the days warm and lengthen, the grass
is getting happy almost overnight.
Under my window the first star of spring
opens its eye on the front lawn. Yellow
as butter, it is only one. But it is one,
and in the nature of things, and like
the multiple asterisks seeding the night sky,
it will flourish and take over every
grassy bank in town. I long to be prolific
as the dandelion, spinning pale parachutes
of words, claiming new territory by
the power of fluff. The stars in their courses
have bloomed an unending glory
across the heavens, but here in my yard
a local constellation prepares to launch
multiple, short-lived, radiant coronas
to proclaim the new-sprung season.
~Luci Shaw “Dandelion”

This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals, and has reached its crowning stage of dying – the delicate seed-globe must break up now – it gives and gives till it has nothing left.

The hour of this new dying is clearly defined to the dandelion globe:  it is marked by detachment.  There is no sense of wrenching:  it stands ready, holding up its little life, not knowing when or where or how the wind that bloweth where it listeth may carry it away.

It holds itself no longer for its own keeping, only as something to be given; a breath does the rest…
~Lillias Trotter from  “Parables of the Cross”

It is spring: soon a field of new dandelions will stand ready in full-puff; their seeds detach as I walk through, flying to their next life.

My own readiness feels very much like the peak of labor in childbirth,
a moment feeling as if time has stopped –
an inevitability that one can never go back to the way things were.

This “crowning” of the new life as it emerges means the surrender and emptying of the old life.

So, like the dandelion, I turn my face full on to the breeze, giving and releasing, until I have nothing left.

Only then – only then – is there a moment of detachment,
a flying to whatever is next,
leading me to eternity.

Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means.
2 Corinthians 8:11

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”