No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.

Lawrence’s image of the dandelion “opened” to the sun frames selfhood as something achieved through relation rather than isolation. To be “fully itself” is not to be sealed off, but to unfold in a living reciprocity with what exceeds the individual—here figured as the sun and, by extension, “the entire living cosmos.” The phrase “pure relationship” reflects Lawrence’s recurring critique of modern, overly mental or self-enclosed life: vitality arises when a creature participates bodily and attentively in the larger rhythms of nature. The dandelion, a common plant, also suggests that such cosmic attunement is ordinary and available, not a rare spiritual attainment.