Rob Gonsalves’ Eclipse Flower shows a field of sunflowers beneath an eclipsed sun. Each blossom seems to hold the same darkened circle at its center, a reflection of the sky above. A young girl gazes upward, caught between wonder and recognition, as though discovering that the ordinary things of the earth are not separate from the mysteries of the heavens.
This painting reminds me of my mother. She is a Kansas native, and Kansas is the Sunflower State. Every time we travel back as a family—most often for Chicken Annie’s—someone greets her with the words, “welcome home.” In those moments, I realize that she belongs among those fields: steady and bright, rooted and reaching.
When I think about her life, I see her reflected in the cycles of the sunflower. In my youth, she was my teacher. Like the tall flower standing over the smaller blooms, she guided me with patience, structure, and care. She lived the truth that Aristotle once wrote: “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Her work as a special education teacher was never about mere instruction—it was about shaping lives, tending to those who most needed steady presence and compassion.
As I grew older, I began to understand that her seeking of the light was not simple or automatic. The sunflower turns its face toward the sun, but that turning is constant effort—a daily discipline. Likewise, my mother oriented her life toward light through choices both large and small: through the creative projects she poured herself into, through her joy in music, through the patient love she offered to family and students. Kierkegaard once said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” My mother’s one thing was always the search for light, even when the day was shadowed.
Now, as an adult, I see another layer: the sunflower as a source of harvest. A field of sunflowers does not only stand tall and bright—it produces seeds that nourish. My mother’s life has been that kind of harvest for me. The values she sowed—patience, creativity, care, resilience—have become the very seeds that shaped me into the man I am today. My mother gave me the nourishment to take that inner journey with strength and courage.
But then there is the eclipse. Unlike the sun, which we take for granted, an eclipse forces us to notice both presence and absence, light and shadow together. My mother has endured her own eclipses: trauma, and difficult relationships with her own parents. Those shadows are part of her story. Yet the eclipse itself reveals a profound truth—that the light is not destroyed, only hidden. Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” My mother’s life testifies to this. She has not erased her struggles, but lived through them, and in doing so has shown me that darkness does not last forever.
When I look at Eclipse Flower, I see more than a surreal trick of perspective. I see my mother across the arc of time: the teacher of my youth, the seeker of light, and the harvest that now sustains me. She is both sunflower and eclipse—ordinary and extraordinary, shadowed and radiant.
Home is not just Kansas, or the fields of sunflowers, or the greeting at Chicken Annie’s. Home is her. And like the girl in the painting, I find myself still looking upward in wonder, grateful that her life has taught me to see both the light and the shadow, and to trust that the light always returns.