Seeing Beauty

All week I have visited and re-visited a bouquet of dahlias that I bought on Sunday. Several times a day, since then I’ve stopped and gazed at them to see if I can see their beauty in a new way. And almost every time I look I see something beautiful that I didn’t see before.

It is my practice of

Seeing Beauty

The mature flowers are beginning to wilt and fade a bit but some ancillary buds are beginning to burst into bloom, adding interest as they dance lightly above their older siblings. I see as much beauty in the gaudy dissolution of these flowers as I do in their full blooming.

Each day I move my camera up or down, further away or closer seeking to see the beauty that is emerging in the moment. I change the angle of the camera so that I’m looking up or I’m looking down on the blossoms. Or I turn the vase so that I see the flowers from a different angle.

Sometimes I set the depth of field so that the entire flower is in focus and sharp and other times I intentionally set a shallow depth of field, experimenting to discover how soft is too soft, how sharp is too sharp.

Sharing Beauty

How can I express the ephemeral gaudy beauty that I see before me? And how can I invite you to gaze in awe at their glorious dancing joyful presence? With each photograph I am asking you to fall in love with the beauty of flowers, as I have, and to fall in love with the beauty of the world and the simple joys of daily life.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

Mary Oliver

Sometimes when I edit the images, I soften them even more or I sharpen them more. It depends upon the photograph and what it seems to be saying to me, what I want it to say to you.

Loving Beauty

The longer I gaze at the flowers, the more deeply I see them.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers–has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

Mary Oliver

I think it is the brevity of their beauty that makes me love them and cherish them so much. They show me that I too will some day fade and wilt and return to become the soil that nourishes new life. Perhaps my remains will nourish a flower or a tree or a garden carrot. Who knows. But the cycles of life are full of grace and beauty. And life is short. So gaze at the flowers while they bloom and practice seeing beauty in all things.

May you walk in beauty.