The Sunflower and the Seed

You are not the problem. You are just early.

If you are reading this, you are probably awakening. The world is opening for you. You might be sitting in your favorite spot to meditate, feeling that current of something divine move through you. It is palpable. You can feel the light of the heavens.

And then - bang! Your significant other walks in and says, "You working on your kooky woo stuff again?" Zap. You fall back to earth, cartwheeling like a squirrel in a tornado.

The inevitable has happened. You are surrounded by people who don't get it.

Your friends think you are the weird one. Your family thinks you are dear, but - dare I say - a bit off. Your kids laugh at your YouTube choices. And the truth of it is this: you feel like the problem.

But you are not the problem. You are the sunflower.

The Sunflower

At some point in awakening, you begin a stage I call "Transcending Reality". You are no longer a sprout. You are a fully grown sunflower.

The sunflower is special. It recognizes the sun. It orients itself toward it and is nourished by the gift of its light. During days of rain and wind, the sunflower does not fret, it already knows the sun is still there and will return tomorrow. It does not fear. It lives in the harmony of existence. It endures. It smiles.

The sun is the love that underlies all of existence. Love as the fundamental nature of what is. The light of consciousness itself. Call it God, call it Source, call it the divine, it is the thing you felt when the world cracked open and something true poured in. The sunflower does not just believe in the sun. It knows it. There is a difference.

You are that state of knowing. You have found the sun. And you cannot unfind it.

What also reigns true is that you are most likely the only sunflower in your immediate circle. That is not an accident. It is by design.

The Seed

So who are the friends and family who have not yet begun the awakening process?

They are the seeds.

The seeds sit beneath the earth in darkness. The seed does not know that the sun exists. And try as you might to communicate through your sunflower roots that there is a sun, that it is warm, that it changes everything, the seed simply cannot feel it yet.

The seed has a shell. That shell is hard, and the seed loves its shell, because it keeps the seed safe from a world it does not yet understand.

The seed and its shell are not something to fix. This is where the seed is supposed to be.

And you are not there to be understood by them. You are there to serve them, and they serve you, whether they know it or not.

Holding Light

Here is what no one tells you about being the sunflower.

It can feel lonely.

You carry something luminous, and the people you love most cannot see it. You want to share it because it is the most real thing that has ever happened to you, and you love them. That is the particular ache of awakening: the gap between what you have found within and what you can give.

And so the temptation comes. To dim yourself. To fold back toward the soil. To speak a little less, shine a little less, so the distance between you and others feels smaller. In the end, it won't work. You cannot unfind the sun, but the temptation is real, and it deserves to be noticed.

What is being asked of you instead is something harder: to love them fully, without requiring them to understand you. To stay warm toward people who think you're off. To remain oriented toward the light, not out of indifference to the seeds, but out of faithfulness to what you've been given.

This is love under difficult conditions. This is holding the light. You tend to the seeds not by convincing them, but by continuing to be what you are - visible, rooted, patient - so that when the crack comes, they know which way is up.

The Cycle

At some point, through pressure, through free will, through trauma, through the accumulated weight of many incarnations, the shell of the seed cracks. And when it cracks, there is finally room for something new to grow.

The sprout pushes upward through the dark. It reaches the soil line. And one day it breaks through into the light.

This is the moment the sprout turns to the sunflower and says: "Did you know there was a sun out here?"

And you will say: "I've been trying to tell you the whole time."

What you must understand is that you cannot tell a seed to grow. You cannot convince it, persuade it, or force it into readiness before it is ready. All you can do is remain what you are - loving, visible, rooted, oriented toward the light - so that when the seed does crack open, it knows which direction to grow.

When the sprout finally joins you above the soil, you become something new to it: the standing example, the teacher, the embodied love it could not feel before. 

The Return

Eventually the sunflower finishes what it came here to do.

It withers. It falls back to the earth. And in doing so, it becomes the very soil that nourishes the next seed.

Nothing is wasted. Nothing is lost. The light you carried does not disappear when you are gone, it feeds what comes after you.

This is the cycle. You are inside of this very cycle right now.

You are not the problem. You are not too much. You are not broken, off, or strange. You have simply found something real, and the world around you has not caught up yet.

Love the seeds. Tend to them. But do not diminish your light trying to make them comfortable with it.

The sun does not apologize for shining. Neither should you.