A Bug and A Beach Chair - Returning to Wonder

Early yesterday I walked out to check on the newly planted sunflower. This sunflower isn't from the seed packets purchased and planted this spring. Thus far those haven't made it past the enticing little green sprout stage the bunnies enjoy.

This particular sunflower traveled from my mother's home miles and miles away in a fern that I tried to winter over for her. The fern died yet from the basket of crisp, brown fronds a sunflower arose transplanted I'm certain by a bird, seed in its mouth from one of her feeders. That sunflower is now four feet high in my yard.

This particular morning I took a chair out, a beach chair bought years ago and placed it in the grass. Although I love my yard, I seldom actually sit in it. I sit on the deck and look at the green and growing things. I felt a need to be near the sunflower and other seedlings just planted.

Before sitting, I checked on the sunflower first and found a rainbow on one of its leaves. A tiny colored cousin to grasshopper, whose stripes resembled the fabric of the beach chair, sat on the leaf.

I was mesmerized by this exotic bug and the chair, the natural and man made appearing so similar, one resting on a green leaf probably to find eventual nourishment in the leaf and the other a resting place for me, on the green earth as I find nourishment in nature.

My mind quickly moved to the many colors of mold in our basement after recent rains, the yellow and blue flecks of tiny living color on wet storage cabinets and the orange on our concrete walls. Then I recalled learning that star dust left when a star is no longer contains the colors of the rainbow. A song from childhood went through my mind, "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight" followed by "somewhere over the rainbow."

How curiously beautiful is this? The colors in the spectrum of the rainbow are found in the infinitesimal to the infinite, from mold and bugs to the stars, with us, people of all colors in between.

Over the rainbow is not 'somewhere.' It is here in the magical, color-filled fabric of earth and sky. It is beneath us, above us and all around us if only we awaken to wonder. May we be mesmerized by the Mystery and remember a level of beauty long forgotten yet still present like the sunflower seed surviving winter now growing in my yard, home to a bug, a beach chair and me.

For wondering: When was the last time you were filled with wonder?

-Dawn! the Good News Muse 9 June 2010
dawn@imaginetheshift.com