Sunflower Reflections

32. 해바라기 단상

32. Sunflower Reflections

Shortly after I began my time as a novice at Mandeoksan Mountain in Jinan, Jeollabuk-do, I decided that I wanted to make sunflowers bloom.

I still have no idea how the idea occurred to me, but I believed that if I planted yellow sunflowers along the road leading to the Choseonji prayer ground where Sotaesan, the founding master of Won-Buddhism, had performed his first Sŏn meditation with students, it could be a source of pleasure to the pilgrims arriving on that road.

Hearing about my idea, Rev. Oh found a mature sunflower along the road and gave it to me to serve as the first seed. Among all the difficulties of my life, it was a small pleasure to spread a mat out in the warm autumn sunshine on Mandeoksan Mountain as I dried the seeds and imagined the mountain blooming all over with sunflowers.

In the end, I was unable to achieve my wish. The same winter, I moved to a different place for my novice duties, and I was so busy with my day-to-day affairs that the dream of sunflowers was soon gone from my mind. Perhaps the seeds I had prepared at the time were roasted to serve as an evening snack for visitors to Mandeoksan Mountain.

A few years passed. I was in Philadelphia, busily preparing for my final semester at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies, when I learned that my former teacher Ven. Chwasan would be visiting the United States. Once again, the idea of planting sunflowers along the road before he arrived came to me.

I hoped that as the sunflowers wilted, they would share their fruits with the local birds and squirrels. I stopped at a nearby nursery and picked out a packet of seeds labeled with the name “Vincent van Gogh.”

I fashioned small seedling pots out of some used paper cups and planted the individual seeds. Every day, I moved the cups around to follow the sunshine and watered the plants in the morning and evening.

I was overjoyed when I finally saw the first sprout poking out through the dirt one day. I planted the seedlings in a row along the road and continued lavishing them with attention, and the fresh sunflowers began pushing their way up toward the sky. I had hopes that the fully grown sunflowers would be taller than a person, as I had heard they could be.

But as I was making my way back from classes one day, I found the sunflowers in tatters, their petals and stems all torn away. I was furious, suspecting the culprits might be the deer that I had often seen in the forests nearby.

Despondent, I left the plants alone for a few days. Such is the tenacity of life that new shoots began to rise out of their haggard stems. But every time new petals appeared, they would be gone once again by the next day.

I later learned about an animal called a groundhog, which I had never seen in Korea. Apparently, they quite like the taste of sunflower petals, and one of them had gone ahead and dug a burrow nearby so it could periodically eat away at mine.

I came across the little fellow nibbling at the sunflower petals at the top of the hill on my way home from school one day. But the chubby creature waddled away and there was nothing I could do. After a few days passed, I could no longer bear to look at the sunflowers, which had turned into a roadside eyesore from the constant nibbling.

The same hands that had planted them now pulled them up by the roots, scrubbing any trace of them from view. I tried to appear nonchalant, but I could not conceal my bitterness and disappointment.

Later on, I moved to New York. I bought some new sunflower seeds, nursed them to sprout, and gave some of them to temple members who have gardens at home; the rest I planted in a well-lit section of the temple lawn.

I asked one visitor to name a flower before they left the temple, and I took and sent pictures to show them how the flower was coming along. That visitor may no longer be in New York, but perhaps there is a piece of their heart that remains here along with the growing sunflower.

After finishing my seated meditation in the morning, I sweep the front area of the temple ground, fill the canister, and water the sunflowers. I have already given them plenty of fertilizer. Heedless of the ever-changing New York weather, the stems grow thicker and the petals lusher by the day with spring in the air.

A few of the blossoms have already been wrested away by curious birds and squirrels, and I’ve had to deal with the sadness and disappointment of having to uproot them once again. But there is no longer any bitterness in my mind as I observe them.

Has the edge dulled? Or am I simply doing my best to disregard it so as not to be wounded again? It is a matter of simply accepting things for what they are; all I can do is offer my devotion.

Some other form of life will sprout there, even if it is not necessarily a sunflower. It will blossom and radiate its own fragrance. This is my practice: not stubbornly insisting on the things that I want, but serenely accepting even the outcomes that I did not desire.

Only now do I realize the truth: that the only way not to betray my warm-hearted self that sought to give joy to his beloved people and share his fruits when he first made sunflowers blossom all those years ago, is not to despise the foul weather and the neighbors who eat those delicious petals before they have the chance to grow, but to possess a mindset that can embrace even such things.