February 10, 2023

sunflowers
are my favorite flower.
something about the big, bright, open yellow
captivates me
and makes me
(almost always slightly secretly dour)
smile so huge.

i often forget that half of the flower is brown,
the earth/
the base of nature/
it wouldn’t be a sunflower without that circle of non-yellow;
the seeds to form new flowers in the future
the giving after giving
of joy/
of new life/
of another kind of open-ness.

i know it’s a bit toxic
to constantly give,
but take it from the sunflower:
sometimes giving gives us our own beauty.

May 2, 2022

it became so much easier
to talk about my drive
to take care of others
when i thought of it as
a trauma response
from childhood.

when approached as something
stemming from the
‘goodness of my own heart’
something akin to being
‘just a good person’
or the source being
‘simply my selfless, altruistic self’
then the ache i felt when i wanted others
to drop everything
and care for me
(the way i did them)
stopped being so disturbingly
selfish/bad person/greedy-hearted
and instead became a warning sign
that i still needed to heal my inner child,
and the care i gave others
wasn’t, in fact, a choice or a personality trait
but was a compulsion driven from a place
of needing what i gave.