What a flower can teach us about rebuilding
By Kris Ellery
Life has many peaks and valleys, and sometimes we find ourselves in a season of fog — uncertain of direction, unsure of what comes next. During those times, it matters deeply to pay attention to what brings us joy, what lights us up, and to move gradually toward those things.
I want to use the sunflower as a guide here.
Sunflowers are known for their beauty and strength, but what makes them remarkable is their behavior. Young sunflowers orient themselves to the sun and follow it across the sky throughout the day. At night they reset, turning back toward the east, preparing to follow it again when morning comes. They don’t chase the light frantically. They simply stay oriented toward it, consistently, day after day.
We can follow that same example.
Once you have identified a goal, a value, or simply an area of life you want to explore and grow into, orient toward it. Let its warmth and light guide you. Focus on it as much as you can, and when something pulls your attention away — and it will — simply come back. No judgment. Just return.
Before you go to bed each night, take a few minutes to assess the day. What pulled you away from your sun? What helped bring you back to center? This isn’t about grading yourself — it’s about releasing the day so you wake up tomorrow without carrying yesterday’s weight.
The sunflower will endure wind, storms, and insects. That is simply a fact of its life. So will we. And here is what’s wonderful: the wind actually strengthens the stem. The sunflower doesn’t avoid the storm — it lives through it and becomes more rooted because of it.
How differently we might face our own hard seasons if we truly believed the same was true for us.
Our real danger isn’t the storm. It’s when we cower before it, or decide that because it came, we are somehow doomed. Let the wind move through you. Let the storm fall. Then turn your face back to the sun.
In time, you’ll find that something shifts. The consistency of returning to your goal, your values, your light — it makes you strong. And that strength becomes something others can see. Just as the sunflower’s orientation attracts pollinators, your focused growth will begin to attract the right people, opportunities, and support. Not because you chased them, but because you became someone worth coming to.
When we get distracted, compare ourselves to others, or turn our energy toward self-criticism, we close ourselves off to that. The pollinators pass us by. But when we stay oriented — imperfectly, consistently, with grace toward ourselves — they find us.
The sunflower has another gift that most people don’t know about.
It belongs to a remarkable family — one that includes sweet daisies and cheerful buttercups — with a quiet superpower built right into its roots. These plants actually draw toxins out of the soil around them through a process called phytoremediation. After the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, fields of sunflowers were planted in the contaminated ground specifically to cleanse it. Not as a symbol. As a solution.
They didn’t wait for the soil to be safe before they started cleaning it. They did the work from inside the mess.
As you orient toward your sun and begin to grow, something similar happens around you. People are watching your journey. They’re learning from it, being quietly shaped by it — and most of the time you’ll never know. We tend to see only the highlight reel in others. We don’t see the tears behind the scenes, the small failures, the days when everything felt uncertain and unstable. Which means someone may be watching your highlight reel right now, finding courage in it, while you feel like you’re barely holding on.
I know this because it happened to me. A friend watched me rebuild my life after an unexpected divorce — new job, new home, new sense of myself — and told me I had inspired her to make a change she’d been afraid to make for years. I didn’t feel inspiring. I felt like I was failing in slow motion. But she saw something true in me that I couldn’t see in myself yet.
You don’t have to feel strong to be someone else’s strength. You just have to keep growing where you’re planted.
And it works the other way too. The opportunities to help others that come your way when you’re focused and growing — editing a friend’s manuscript, mentoring someone newer than you, simply showing up fully for the people in your life — those acts of service quietly heal something in you as well. The sunflower doesn’t clean the soil as a separate project from growing. It happens simultaneously, naturally, as a byproduct of simply being what it is.
You don’t need to seek out ways to inspire or serve. You just need to follow your sun — fully, honestly, imperfectly — and remain open to the moments when you can offer your hand to someone walking a similar path.
That is phytoremediation. And you are already doing it.
There is one more thing the sunflower does before it goes.
It produces hundreds of seeds — each one carrying the potential for a completely new plant. The sunflower doesn’t direct where they go. The wind carries them, birds carry them, people carry them. It just produces them faithfully, completely, and then releases them.
And those seeds are not merely symbolic. Sunflower seeds are genuinely nourishing — they feed birds, people, and the soil itself. What you scatter has real value right now, in the present, not only in some distant future you can’t yet see. The encouragement you offered someone this week. The thing you made or said or did that someone needed today. You are already feeding the ground around you.
For a person rebuilding, the seeds are everything. The conversation you had with someone struggling that you forgot about the next day. The thing you created that outlasted the season you made it in. The version of yourself your children are watching and quietly learning from. The student who remembers that someone showed up steady for them when their own life felt uncertain.
You don’t have to engineer any of that. You just have to grow.
It isn’t always clear what your sun is, and that’s okay. It’s okay if it shifts over time. The important thing isn’t having a perfectly defined destination. The important thing is staying open to warmth, noticing what draws you, and being willing to turn toward it.
Start paying attention to what feels aligned. What captures your attention so completely that you lose track of time? What activities or conversations leave you feeling more like yourself rather than less? What feels consistent with your values, even if you can’t fully explain why?
We aren’t always in a position — financially, practically, emotionally — to devote ourselves fully to those things. That’s the reality of rebuilding. But you can orient toward them in the pockets you do have. Small steps. Stolen moments. A little progress on a Tuesday evening. It will take longer than you want it to. That’s okay too. If your focus stays on it and you keep returning to it — the way the sunflower turns back toward the east before bed — you will get there.
And along the way, without planning it or even noticing it, you will have scattered seeds everywhere. In the small moments you spent with someone who needed you. In the courage you modeled for someone watching your highlight reel. In the thing you made, the word you said, the steadiness you showed up with on a day when steadiness cost you something.
That is the life of the sunflower. And it is available to you.
Before you go, sit with these three questions — not as an assignment, just as an invitation:
What feels like light to you right now — even faintly?
What is one thing that feels aligned with who you are or who you want to become?
What is one small way you can turn toward it this week?