What the sunflower knows about your soul

There’s a childlike belief that persists when we observe nature. We believe that if we look closely enough at the world, it will unveil itself to us.

Our desire to perceive hidden meaning in the natural world remains strong. What if flora and fauna are revealing themselves to us by their very forms?

This desire is perhaps why we give creatures names that project our interpretations onto them. My husband showed me a beautiful moth that resembles lichen, known as “Laudable Arches.” There’s a goblin shark and a corpse flower and a bird called a strange-tailed tyrant. Objects themselves have—and are—a language to us.

Novelist A.S. Byatt writes in Still Life:

“In the Renaissance there was a belief that language was a God-given symbolic system describing, or naming, objects that in their turn were a language, like the hieroglyphs, written by the Creator on the surface of things, so that flowers, girasole, heliotrope, represented, for instance, the spiritual truth of the soul turning to the source of light and life.”

A sunflower turning toward the sun every day could be telling us something about our souls.

Byatt continues:

“Chance correspondences, correspondences depending on the narrowness or obsessiveness of our own vision, correspondences explored by scientists in search of the laws of growth, light, motion, gravity—all these were part of a divine language that was the Word informing inchoate matter.”