Beauty

It’s the season of dahlias in bloom and I am in

Dahlia Love

Until I became a photographer I under-appreciated these lovely flowers. The sheer number of sizes, shapes, and colors of dahlias available boggles the mind. Though I missed seeing the Experimental Dahlia Garden at the Arboretum this year (because they never planted it), I am enjoying seeing all of the cut dahlias available at the farmers markets and at the Food Coop.

Saturday morning I picked up a luscious bouquet of flowers at the Hopkins Farmers Market. It was filled with dahlias, a single sunflower, and a sprig of white lisianthus flowers. I spent most of Saturday playing with the flowers in one way or another. One of the big dahlia flowers broke off of its stem on the way home when the bouquet rolled off the car seat onto the floor of the car.

It was a happy accident

I was sad to see the breakage but I was soon experimenting with scanning the flower head under a black velvet cloth on my scanner and then photographing it on the same black velvet cloth to see whether I liked the scanned version or the photograph taken with my camera better.

(I liked the scanned version best and used it on Saturday’s blog post.)

I then found a small antique candy plate that held just enough water to float the flower head. Setting the plate on the black velvet and photographing the dahlia from above was very interesting. (See the first photo in this post.)

One of the challenges of photographing the deep red and burgundy dahlias is getting the color depicted in the photograph as my eye sees it. I edited and re-edited several of the images in this post. And though I was happy with some of them, the exact color eluded me on others.

When I play with photographing flowers I am

Playing with beauty

I enjoyed reading an essay by poet and philosopher, David Whyte, on beauty today. Here is an excerpt from it:

The harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us; the eyes, the ears or the imagination suddenly become a bridge between the here and the there, between then and now, between the inside and the outside; beauty is the conversation between what we think is happening outside in the world and what is just about to occur far inside us. 

 

Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting; the self forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other. Beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful, frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world. Beauty is almost always found in symmetries: the symmetries seen out in creation, the wings of the moth, the airy sky and the solid earth, the restful, focused eyes of a loving face in which we see our own self reflected: the symmetry also, therefore, of bringing together inner and outer recognitions, the far horizon of otherness seen in that face joined to the deep inner horizon of our own being. Beauty is an inner and an outer complexion living in one face.

 

Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur, the scattering of the first spring apple blossom, the turning, spiraling flight of a curled leaf in the falling light; the smoothing of white sun-filled sheets by careful hands setting them to air on a line, the broad expanse of cotton filled by the breeze only for a moment, the sheets sailing on into dryness, billowing toward a future that is always beckoning, always just beyond us. Beauty is the harvest of presence.

   — David Whyte. Excerpted from ‘BEAUTY’  in the book Consolations

Have a lovely day.

May you walk in beauty.