As my amaryllis flowers gift me with their beautiful blooms, winter feels like it has finally arrived in Minnesota. It’s bitterly cold outside today. And I am grateful that we’ve once again escaped the heavy snow that fell south and east of us. It’s great weather for curling up with a good book or for photographing amaryllis flowers.
I am currently reading Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, and loving her beautiful essays on nature unfolding in her backyard. Her descriptions of the beauty of the world around her feel like
A Beautiful Love Letter to the World
and I need to read her words now more than ever.
The color illustrations in the book painted by Renkl’s brother Billy Renkl, are wonderful and they add to the splendor of this beautiful book. In fact the whole book feels like a prayer book centered on the grace and beauty of nature.
I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.
― The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
With the bitter cold outside I am grateful to have my beautiful amaryllis flowers all in bloom this weekend. Their flowers last for days and I have just begun to explore their grace and beauty.
Every morning for the past few days I spent time photographing them. Each time I make a new photograph of them I look at them from different angles, use different lenses, get up close, vary the amount of the flower that is in focus, and keep on exploring and playing. The more time I spend quietly observing them the more that I see.
I think my flower photographs are my beautiful love letter to the world. Look, here, and here, and over there! Can you see the grace of this curve, the softness of that petal, and the vivid color of those? The longer that I study and photograph flowers the more that I see.
Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow. It only reveals itself to you when you are present.
— Eckhart Tolle
Take some time to contemplate beauty this week if you can. And stay warm, my Minnesota friends.
May you walk in beauty.
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