Little Suns in the Grass
There’s a Swedish summer song I’ve carried with me for most of my life. It talks about letting the dandelions grow, even though everyone calls them weeds. About sitting with the memory of little suns in the grass, long after summer has gone. Because summer is too short, and we need the memories through cold and wet winters.
I thought about it this morning when I looked out at the yard and saw them there. Bright, cheerful, completely unbothered by their reputation.
And I thought, honestly, same.
The weed that isn’t
Here’s the thing about dandelions. They’re one of the first flowers to appear in spring, which makes them one of the most important early food sources for bees. Their roots break up compacted soil. Every part of them is edible. They’re medicinal, nutritious, and extraordinarily resilient.
And we spend an enormous amount of energy trying to get rid of them.
Because someone, somewhere, decided they didn’t belong in a tidy garden.
Sound familiar?
The small stuff we talk ourselves out of noticing
We’re very good, most of us, at waiting for the big moments. The holiday. The promotion. The milestone birthday. The thing we’ve been working toward for months.
And while we’re waiting, spring arrives. The days get longer. The yard fills up with little suns, and we’re too busy looking at the to-do list to notice.
Joy doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. More often it shows up quietly, in the ordinary Wednesday morning moments. The first cup of tea of the day. The dog doing something ridiculous. The way the light looks at a particular time of afternoon. The dandelions, bright and completely unbothered, doing their thing in the grass.
The question is whether we’re looking for it.
A small invitation
This is something I talk about with clients quite a lot. We call it Pearl Diving. Who finds more pearls, a pearl diver or a bus driver? A pearl diver, of course, because that’s who’s looking for them. We find what we go looking for.
If you’re convinced that joy is somewhere in the future, waiting behind the next achievement or the next change, you’ll keep finding reasons why it isn’t here yet. But if you start looking for it in the small and the seasonal, in the dandelions, in the ordinary everyday, in the tiny moments that don’t make it onto anyone’s highlight reel, you’ll start finding it in places you never thought to look.
You don’t have to overhaul your life to feel more joy in it. Sometimes you just have to let the dandelions grow and take a moment to notice that they’re beautiful.
This week
Pick one small, seasonal, easily overlooked thing and give it your full attention for just a moment. The blossom on the tree you walk past every day. The smell of the air after rain. The particular quality of a late afternoon in spring.
Notice it. Really notice it. And see what happens.
I let all my dandelions grow. And every spring, without fail, they remind me that joy was never very far away. It was just waiting to be looked for.