What August has taught me about love…

And sunflowers too.

August is my favourite time of year.

Not because it’s hot, or sunny, or it doesn’t rain (if you live in the UK you’ll know that for the lie that it is).

No, not those things. It’s because it feels the most like life to me.

It feels the most like what it is to love, for me.

Sunflowers too.

Everything still feels very much alive in August, yet we feel the summer ending, we can feel winter approaching. But, despite knowing the dark is coming, we don’t enjoy the last of the warmth and the sunshine any less. If anything, I feel we relax into it and enjoy it more, knowing that it’s soon to end.

Similarly with sunflowers, we grow and nurture them until they grow as tall as they can, blooming into a brilliant, bright yellow flower, all the while knowing that they won’t last forever, that they’ll die and the cycle will continue next year. But we don’t enjoy the bloom any less. If anything, its temporary nature means we enjoy it more.

And I think that’s what it means to be human.

And I think it’s completely remarkable.

‘August’ was the first painting I ever created from instinct and intuition. By that I mean, the composition popped into my head one day and I decided to paint it. Simple as that. No reference photo, no second guessing, just painting. Feeling my way into it. Finding my feet as I went a long.

I was quite scared, actually. The perfectionist in me convinced that I would ‘get it wrong’, while the actual artist in me felt free, in movement, easing into a rhythm. I think part of me also knew what I was going to have to face in the painting of it.

When I started, I didn’t know what the painting was about, not really. I knew I wanted to capture what the month of August felt like to me — a freshly picked bunch of flowers from the garden, light streaming through an open door, blue sky outside… But the darkness and the shadow were a surprise.

So much so, that, when I found myself crying while painting the sunflowers, I was taken aback. Where were these tears coming from? What was this feeling? I’d thought I was just painting my favourite summer flowers - HA.

No, for the first time in my life, I was allowing myself to grieve at the same time as love. A feeling I hadn’t allowed to exist before. I hadn’t understood before.

Surprised is an understatement for what I was at that moment. Snotty is not.

It’s funny what creating art can do, what it can release. Your conscious mind so convinced of one thing, completely oblivious, while your unconsciousness quietly whirs away in the background, waiting for the medium of paint to let you in on one of life’s biggest lessons.

Sunflowers remind me of my Grandad. Every year during my childhood he would grow a sunflower for me, my sister and each of my cousins. We’d water them every time we visited, track their growth, prop them up against sticks of bamboo and eagerly await the day when they would bloom. And when they would, in the midst of August, he’d greet us on our visit, take us round to the garden and show us how beautiful they were. We’d go back to playing, watched over by these tall, proud, vibrant symbols of his love, and we’d feel safe and content.

I didn’t cry for almost a year after he passed away. I don’t think my brain could fathom it, really. I don’t think I could witness the space that was left. And so my mind did what it does best, it ignored it. Pretended it wasn’t happening. It shut the memories away, the feelings, the grief. I think brains do that for protection, but the body is always left picking up the slack. Even when I did eventually cry, it wasn’t for my Grandad. It was diverted to something I could control, that I could safely rage at. The tears were angry tears and the grief was still stored tightly inside.

So it was a surprise to me when the tears started flowing while I was painting ‘August’. When I didn’t immediately try to shut them down. When they arrived with a feeling of acceptance. With a feeling of immense love. A feeling of awe.

In a split second, I was let into the open secret that everyone who has lost someone close to them comes to realise: Grief and love are the same thing.

I’ll repeat, grief and love are the same thing.

That loving someone is knowing that you are going to lose them one day but loving them anyway.

That to live is to lean fully into those beautiful moments in life, surrounded by the people you love, the sun shining, the sunflower in fully bloom, and to do so in the knowledge that this time is going to end.

That we are temporary and that we are going to die, but that this makes the journey all the more beautiful.

That this is what it is to be human. To love someone, or something so deeply and to do so even when we know that we are temporary, that it cannot last, but to do it anyway and knowingly accept the pain that comes with it.

I think it’s beautiful, our capacity to do this. Beautiful, heartbreaking, human. Exquisite and excruciating.

And that balance is what August reminds me of. That’s what sunflowers remind me of. Of love, and loving, a person, a time, a moment so incredibly bright, baring our heart to it, embracing it fully, while simultaneously knowing that one day it will end, it will become a memory, and it will really, bloody hurt. The bittersweet beauty of what it means to live and love as a human.

That’s why August is my favourite month and sunflowers are my favourite flower, my house is filled with them. And they always will be. They remind me of what it is to be human, and of the deal I’ve accepted to have the capacity to love as I do and of the people I love with it. And what an immense privilege that is, to feel love so completely.

That’s what I wanted to capture in this painting, what I want more than anything for you to feel when you look at it and spend time with it.

For me, it represents all of the people I've loved and love still, all of the moments I've had with them, and all of the grief that is yet to come, living alongside each other in a beautiful expression of what it feels like to be a human with this knowledge.

I hope you feel this too.

I hope you feel it everyday.

I hope that you love so very deeply, that you cherish your August moments and your sunflower people, that your memories are full of their glow.

And I hope that you feel the dark alongside it too. At the very least, I hope you feel it just enough to recognise what a true privilege it is to be temporary on this earth, with the beings you love and the time that you have, and what an immense gift it is to be able love in this perfectly, painfully human way.

I know I’d have it no other way. Would you?