Flower Power

I love gerbera daisies. So yesterday I picked up two bunches of them at Trader Joe’s — one white bunch and one pink bunch.

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

Flower Power!

With the gray skies yesterday and today it’s been a good time to do some flower photography in my dining room studio. One of the white gerbera flowers that I bought yesterday had little green sprigs popping out of the center of the flower. I love their curvy energy.

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

When I photograph flowers I “scrutinize them intensely,” as poet, Mary Oliver suggests. And I come back again and again to study them, seeking to see something I haven’t seen before. Sometimes I pick a single flower or a trio of flowers and photograph them. When I stop seeing something new to love about them, I walk away for awhile.

And then, when I come back later, I often see something I hadn’t noticed before. My heart leaps with a little thud of joy as I view them through the lens of my camera once again. There! And there! And there!

Things change even though they may seem the same. If nothing else, the light changes minute by minute, hour by hour and time moves ever forward towards the fading and dissolution of these finite living beacons of light.

I see something infinite, unfathomable, and deep in them. If I peer long enough and deeply enough perhaps I will discover one of the secrets of life.

You Cannot Hurry Seeing

Seeing deeply into the beauty of something takes time and patience. It cannot be hurried. and no matter how often I photograph the same flower, each time I photograph it, it is different. I wonder if the thing they say about no two snowflakes being identical can also be said about flowers. Is each flower unique?

What do you love so much that you almost never tire of studying, drawing, writing, sculpting, photographing, or singing about?

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in

For me it’s flower power. But for you it can be anything that lights you up.

May you walk in beauty.