On Spring and Dandelions

On Spring and Dandelions

Spring comes early this year. It will arrive late in the day on March 19th. I can’t remember it ever coming that early, but at my age, I don’t remember much… I don’t remember what happened the last time spring came in a leap year. It might have been early that year too. It doesn’t matter. I’m quite satisfied that the universe is working as it should. And if it isn’t what I am going to do about it?

I noticed, this year, the dandelions have decided to come a little earlier too. Many people don’t like dandelions in their yards – they consider them to be weeds.

But they’re actually quite beautiful really.

Their bright yellow flowers signal that spring is near and the greening of the world is at hand. The perfect-lawn people hate dandelions and kill them with chemicals – to them, dandelions are just an ugly, useless weed.

But I think they are quite lovely. Their vivid yellow flowers are symbols of rebirth and childhood to me. The first flower I ever picked for my mom was a dandelion. I picked five or six of them and brought them home. I remember she put them in a glass of water. She was so happy with me for thinking of her. I must have been all of five-years-old then.

I bet most of us picked dandelions for our moms and grandmothers when we were kids. We didn’t know or care if they were weeds then. In our innocence, we saw only their beauty and their happy bright yellow flowers.

How sad it is that we become so jaded as adults and our concept of beauty becomes so narrow and so blurred.

There is beauty all around us but our problems and we’ve become so jaded that we rarely notice it —  unless the beauty would benefit us in some way. A man. A woman. A painting. A statue. We only notice the beauty that might bring some benefit — some reward to us. It’s the selfish, yet so telling “look what I’ve got” desire that grows inside us. It’s hard to get away from that “look what I’ve got” mentality, isn’t it? We’ve all experienced it – it’s a difficult desire to quell.

To me, beauty is like a dandelion – it just takes a more glance to see its beauty. It’s hard to see dandelions as beautiful if we see look upon it as a weed. But a field of buttercup-yellow dandelions is a dazzlingly beautiful sight. At least it is to me.

Beautiful things are all around us. All we have to do is look and we’ll see them every day — the endless canopy of stars twinkling on a cool, clear night. The sunrise bringing majestic beauty to a summer morning. Our world is overflowing with beauty, but we rarely take the time to look.

Sadly, if the beauty around us brings no benefit, we are blind to it. A beautiful summer sunrise can be nothing more than a reminder that we’ve slept too long –  or that we have to get up and go to work.

But a beautiful sunrise is a gift. And it brings with it another gift. The gift of a new day. Every day is precious. We can do great things with the gift of a new day —  we can use it to be a better person or use it to be a little kinder to others. Though we forget, we don’t have an unlimited supply of new days. How sad it is that on most mornings we awaken to a beautiful sunrise and the gift of a new day giving it a single thought.

It is ever too late to recognize all the beauty we so often ignore? I wish I knew the answer to that. One thing I do know is that there is beauty is everywhere and in everything around us. All we have to do is look. 

And everything is as it seems. 

Many magnificent and beautiful things are hidden. Who finds beauty in a very old person? Not many. Yet there is beauty in wisdom, it is just very hard to see. You have to look beyond those aging eyes and wrinkled face to see it. Who finds beauty in an extremely obese person – like the one who waddles down the aisle in front of us in a grocery store? Not me and not many others either. But there just may be a golden heart inside that grossly misshapen body – but no one sees it because no one bothers to look beneath the surface.

When I think about it, I realize that I often — wrongly — think of unattractive things as weeds – and maybe you do too. Just weeds in our lives and of no consequence. He or she is homely we might say.  But they may well be a much kinder and better person than me.   That’s an ugly house, we might say, yet it may be a wonderful home to a beautiful family and the interior of that ugly house is aglow with the love of a beautiful family.

To some the world is poxy with weeds: To the rich and powerful the poor and the weak may be weeds. And to the healthy the sick may be weeds; to the beautiful, the ugly may be weeds. We may consider those whose background or color or religion is not the same as ours as weeds. Some working people consider those on welfare weeds — lazy, lacking, weeds. We grow up and we stop looking except to see the worst in things.

We lose the ability to see dandelions as beautiful flowers and instead see them as weeds.

 As children, we picked dandelions and thought of them as lovely gifts to give someone we loved… and they were. But it didn’t take us long to for the world to each us that dandelions are not pretty at all because they are just weeds. Our perspective changes and we become blinded by growing up and the loss of innocence and simplicity. The more complex our lives become the less likely we are to look beneath the surface of things and thus miss the beauty all around us. We judge beauty differently than children because, I think, we become jaded.

There so many beautiful things in the world that we simply don’t see because we simply don’t look. There is so much beauty hidden in the world in those things we call weeds.

There is beauty all around but we have to stop and take time to look. Look around you: The moon and the sunset and the hawk on a wire and the bees and the cattails, the old couples walking hand-in-hand, the old friends and old aunties with regaling us with stories from long ago, old books, old teddy bears, and ancient barns.

And dandelions.

There are beautiful things all around us. All we have to do is take off the blindfold that time wrapped around our eyes.

I wonder how many beautiful things I miss every day? I wonder how much beauty I’ve missed because much of what I see I consider to be weeds.

Children are innocent and full of wonder and because they are they can see flowers where we see only weeds.

I just took the time to walk around my house. The sun was bright and spring is well on its way. Tulips, crocuses, daffodils, and dandelions are being born again. The days are getting longer and each day a little warmer. I’ve been too busy – or too jaded — to notice, my mind too confused to care, my spirit bound with worry.

But today I stopped and looked and saw the beauty all around me – and felt the blessing of spring approaching. 

One of these years I won’t be around to see spring come.  But I guess it won’t make any difference that year, because I will be a part of the Earth, and the sky, and the stars, the clouds, the oceans, the cosmos. I’ll be wherever I was before I was born. Somewhere in time and in that nebulous ephemeral spinning cloud of dust and gas that swirls majestically and silently between the galaxies waiting for gravity to weave it into a star and then explode into glorious light.

Maybe I could just start all over again. On days like this, I wish I could.

Today I took the time to walk around my yard and see the beauty I’ve so long ignored. And yes, those first dandelions that have opened in the pre-spring sun, look just as beautiful as they should. The crocuses are blooming early. The tulips and daffodils are growing fast and soon their beautiful blooms will brighten the world.

Children see the beauty in weeds. All kinds of weeds. Today, I was lucky enough to see the world through the eyes of a child.  I picked a few dandelions and brought in the house and put them in a glass of water. They remind me of childhood and the days I picked dandelions for my mom and made her smile. I’ll try to remember this tomorrow and all the rest of the days of my life. I will try harder to see the world through the eyes of a child rather than the eyes of an old jaded man. 

Dandelions made me think today. And they made me smile.