Most adults would claim that Dandelions are WEEDS and they have absolutely no business surviving and thriving in an otherwise perfectly manicured lawn. Adults would say that because they have lost their ability to actually see the magic of a Dandelion. Unscrew those adult eyes and screw in the eyes of a child.
Dandelions are beautiful shades of yellow, set against varying shades of green. Children are drawn to the contrast of colors. Their flowers are soft to the touch, like velvet. Children will pluck them uninhibitedly from the ground. No one yelling at them to STOP, like if they were about to pull off Grandmother’s prized lilies or roses. They can gleefully throw them in the air, and keep plucking as many as they want to.
Dandelions open their flowers in daylight and close them at dusk.
How many Mothers have received a more exquisite flower since?
Some Mothers will dismiss them and discard them, crushing a child’s delight in sharing something he found beautiful, and wanting her to keep it. It is an amazing unconscious act of Love.
Still, other Mothers will understand this and press them into old cookbooks over a recipe they would never consider making, and accidentally find them twenty, thirty, forty years later. They burst into tears over how simple life was when her child was small, or alive.
How many siblings were tortured with the question, ‘Do you like butter?‘ having had a dandelion shoved under their nose, or chin and magically creating a yellow reflection on their skin. How many still miss their siblings when the dandelions burst open their yellow blooms?
For centuries, Dandelions have bred legends about them.
In medieval rituals, dandelions being the color of gold were used to predict whether a child would be rich. When the flower was held beneath the chin, the golden glow indicated the child would indeed be rich. In 18th century England, children held the dandelion under their chin and the more golden the glow the sweeter and kinder they were.
God’s magic doesn’t stop there. When the dandelions’ yellow blooms fade and turn to seed, they are transformed into perfectly rounded balls of white fluff.
One legend surrounding these flowers was that Dandelions were used as a variation on the daisy petal plucking past time of “he loves me, he loves me not” If you blow on a white dandelion head and every seed scatters then you are loved. If some seeds still cling to the stalk, then your intended has reservations about the relationship.
Other legends say that if you make a wish immediately before blowing on dandelion, your wish just might come true. Another belief was that the number of seeds left after blowing the seed head indicated the number of children that a girl would have in later life.
As dandelions turn to seed, children everywhere rush to pick them, so that they can close their eyes, make a wish, and blow the seeds into the air. Dandelions are not just in the business of granting wishes. Many people believe that dandelion seeds will carry your thoughts and dreams to loved ones when you blow them into the air. We need more flights of fancy in our lives.
We never will have the power to know what the future may befall on us. Our power lies in how we choose to react to our miseries and misfortunes. Choose to see the rest of your life with the eyes of a child. For me personally, no matter the circumstance, I will forever choose to seek joy, wonder, and merriment.
If you are able to find those things, you will also find the very magic of life.
Dandelions. God’s most perfect flower.
Christopher Ramirez
Steve Date
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