Strive for Peace!
Build and Nurture a Better world by reaching for the Sun filled with super Sunflower Power!
Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine. The proud flowers have throughout history been associated with power, strength, warmth and positivity. The strong resemblance to our Sun often puts a smile on our faces.
The last week we have seen pictures and videos of heartbreak but we have also met families and children that have shown bravery and resilience. Sunflowers are loved by bees and insects. Birds love munching on their seeds. These easy to grow attractive plants are loved by wildlife and children.
Sunflowers are loved by children and they can be grown in your garden or in school. Sometimes we measure how tall a sunflower has grown but this focus misses the point. Beauty and friendship cannot and shouldn’t be measured.
Positive peace is associated with a focus on building a more sustainable future. To achieve a positive peace we need to nurture our resilience.
Nature is resilient to disturbances and nature has the capacity to absorb disturbances and still keep its basic functions, and structure. Yet, resilience usually has a limit. If there is too great disturbances, nature losses its ability to make the necessary corrections.
You’ll find resilience everywhere in nature. And you can learn a lot about nature as well as human resilience if you look for an example of resilience in your local area. Identify and explore how nature uses diversity, redundancy, decentralization, self-renewal, and self-repair to enable resilience.
Researchers are now on their way to unlocking the genetic key to sunflower resilience.
“How do sunflowers grow in the desert? Wild sunflowers display extensive variation, both between and within species, and scientists have now reported that variation is preserved by blocks of “supergenes” that permit adaptation to different environments.” University of Georgia
“Hello, little seed,
striped gray seed.
Do you really know everything
about sunflowers?
My hoe breaks apart
the clods of brown earth,
but you do the real work
down in the dark.
Not radish work or pumpkin,
not thistle work –
sunflower work.
All the instructions are written in your heart.”
From the book To Be Like the Sun by Susan Marie Swanson and Margaret Chodos-Irvine
Why not plant some Sunflower seeds this Spring?
Plant the seeds for Peace.
Plant them to learn from Nature.
Plant Sunflower seeds to help us build a resilient world with a heart!
P.S. Look at the bees in the photo above. Think about how bees work together. . .
Biomimicry for Young Children 