On Healing and Heliotropism
I pulled my kitchen chair over to the window this morning to inch closer to the rising sun, the early chatter of the birds, the soft yet vibrant pastels of the spring leaves’ first exposure to the world.
My body aches and my brain is filled with the dull pain of a fog. Just yesterday I entrusted my body yet again to the brilliant science of a solution to our planet’s global pandemic. Though this vaccine can make the body temporarily sick, it is a small price to pay to keep myself and others safe and healthy.
A man I am falling for fell sick with this pandemic’s costly illness many months ago now. He is still fighting. His heart races, his body drags with fatigue, an electricity pulses through his legs that prevent much-needed sleep.
He longs for spring to come in his body. He daily inches himself closer to the sun’s rays, the birds’ conversations, the leaves’ reach towards both the earth and the light.
Since being sick, he says that he is like the heliotropic sunflower, which continuously turns its face towards the sun as it moves across the sky.
How does the body know it needs nature to heal? Why in my body’s aches this morning did I instinctively pull my chair to the light streaming into the window?
The body knows and becomes heliotropic itself because every spring, after winters that feel like an eternity…
delightful pastel buds appear
the sun ignites their green-gold hue
our feathered siblings announce that the night is over.
Today as my body aches and the world groans and my soul longs for healing, I instinctively inch towards the light, towards that which grows, towards healing that is ours.
