A lesson in transience

This morning I picked up a small bunch of delphiniums in the store when I was doing my weekly grocery shopping. Delphiniums are one of my favorite flowers. We grew them in our flower garden beside the house when I was a child, though the variety my mother grew were a brighter sturdier blue than the bunch I bought today. The flowers I picked looked like the freshest bunch there with many flowers with closed buds that I thought would slowly open. I hoped to spend many days photographing their delicate beauty.

When I got home and took them out of their wrapping, petals fell everywhere. Some of the flower stems were bare before I could even trim them. When I got done carefully separating and trimming them, three stems still held on to most of their flower petals and three stems were almost bare.

It was a great

Lesson in transience

Because there were so few flowers left and they were clearly going to drop their petals very soon I spent much of the day photographing them. As I photographed and gently moved the vase this way and that flower petals drifted down.

The fallen petals are beautiful just as they are—little blue and purple and pinkish reminders of beauty and transience. I think they are wonderful reminders to not cling too tightly to things because everything changes.

“Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn’s approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven’t faded yet.

In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.

But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shining head they will flutter
And fall——and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.

And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them—
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

May you walk in beauty.