Memorial Day Musings & Prayers 🌻
“We are sunflowers, golden and radiant. Our job is to be loving and peaceful wherever we stand.”
~ from The Three Sunflowers by Janet Lucy
Illustration by Colleen McCarthy-Evans for The Three Sunflowers by Janet Lucy
“What if peace is a glorian?”
A presence that has been here all along, one we’ve lost sight of amid the news, the noise, the endless chaos of the outer world.
So conditioned are we to look outside ourselves — to headlines, governments, external authorities — that we may be forgetting something essential:
Peace resides inside us.
Where then, does it exist? one might ask.
Years ago, when the inspiration for my children’s book, The Three Sunflowers, first arrived, the world felt increasingly tumultuous. There had been a tsunami, a mudslide, 9/11 — so many frightening images flooding our collective consciousness. My heart especially went out to the world’s children.
How, I wondered, can we help them feel peace?
And then Gloria appeared.
The central character in the story, a radiant sunflower, emerged in my imagination like a kind of Divine Mother.
She sprang up in a garden from a seed of divine love and peace — the same essence that lives within all of us, even when we forget it is there.
In the book, Gloria gently guides the two young sunflowers:
“Find a still point within you …
Breathe all the way down into your roots.”
This is what I most want children — and adults — to remember:
Peace is not something distant, beyond our reach.
It is the essence of the human spirit, seeded in the soul of each of us, no matter how deeply buried.
I am a child of the 1960s — a flower child. I remember the iconic poster declaring: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
It hung on walls, appeared on car bumpers, T-shirts, medallions — “a simple yet powerful statement of conscience" created in 1965 by Lorraine Art Schneider for the organization “Another Mother for Peace.”
And of course, the image was a sunflower.
Only later did I discover that sunflowers are an international symbol of peace.
I didn’t know this consciously when I wrote The Three Sunflowers.
And yet somehow, I did.
Perhaps this is the deeper wisdom moving through all of us — the universal remembering that peace is our essential nature, appearing in shared symbols, inspirations, and dreams.
And yet here we are, sixty years later, witnessing another senseless war and the ongoing devastation in Ukraine, whose national flower is also the sunflower.
In an interview about the Ukrainian version of Три Соняшники / The Three Sunflowers, I found myself saying:
“I believe war will become obsolete in our lifetime, and I’m not leaving until it is.”
One viewer replied:
“We better get to work so Janet can leave knowing world peace.”
I smiled when I heard that.
But I am here for this.
And I do believe war will someday become obsolete — when enough human beings, and especially our children and our children’s children, stand together and chant once again:
“Hell no, we won’t go.” (Do you also remember that?)
And perhaps when women and mothers, once again, have the final say.
“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” ~ E. M. Forster
REFLECTIVE WRITING PROMPTS: ✨✍️✨
Finding a still point …
Breathing …
Feeling peace …
Essence of the human spirit …
Seeded in each of us …
Thank you for reading my "Divine Inklings" ... I always love to hear from you.
And please feel free to share this blog post with anyone who might enjoy it. 📧💫
💖 Janet
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