After drinking some wine and talking to the winemaker, Hive account@urban.scout and I ran to our small cottage. I immediately saw the fynbos flower and ran towards it to take some photographs of it. But it was raining. So I snapped some photographs without even looking at them or the flower. The sole focus was on taking the photographs and getting back to safety. The old Nikon D300 does not like the rain nor do I when I have all my gear with me. I guess investing in some new gear that is partially waterproof is the next step. But for now, I do not have that luxury.

Only afterwards when I looked at the photographs did I realise how special they were with the rain sticking to them. It was a fine rain, later that night bigger drops fell. But they almost looked like the dew diamonds in my previous post.

Here is a close-up of the flower:

The soft texture of the flower is alluring. It pulls one into it, almost asking one to touch it. The touch is also soft, yet firm. The flowers need to withstand the harsh Cape weather, but it also needs to attract birds and insects. It surely attracts humans!

The almost perfect circularity of the flower is enticing. It feels to me like I am staring into another world, into the eye of some cataclysmic event, or the eye of some strange animal. The motion in the flower, almost leading towards the middle focal point, encourages this idea of an eye. The more I look the more it feels like a primordial animal staring back at me. How did Nietzsche phrase it, stare into the abyss and it will stare back.

Not all of the flowers are perfect. Some of them have grown old, like the primordial animal itself, or the person of old age. Yet, in this rather unraveled state or stage, there is also beauty. It becomes abstract, one's eye searches for the primordial eye, yet it does not find it. But now it feels like you can grab something from it, almost like you can put your hand into the eye and grab the feather-like structures that hide inside it.

But this is also not the final stage, there is also beauty in the old shriveled, and dried up. Betwixt the green of new growth, the old and grey-silver flowerhead remains. It acts as a reminder of what once was. It acts as a reminder of the former glory and beauty. Now, though, it is merely a placeholder for what is to come again. Always on the brink of new growth, yet, nothing of the kind yet. Past, not present, and not future - yet.

The last flower sticks its head out as if a declaration of its worth in the bunch. Yet another eye of primordial animalistic nature, young and not yet in full bloom.

Postscriptum, or a White Flower Emerges!

Whilst driving home from another wine farm, I spotted a flower I have never seen in the wild yet. The white protea. Wow, what a beautiful flower indeed and I think it is perfect to share them here in this post after the flowers above. It serves as a nice color contrast.

I took them with my iPhone. The white of the flower did not want to be photographed by my Nikon D300. It was too sharp of a white. The background was either too bright or too dark, the white flower itself evaded my lens. How funny that the beauty did not want to be captured.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed this rather philosophical post. I did not plan to write what I wrote, it seemed to just flow from my keyboard. I have been jamming my head with Heideggarian philosophy for the last two weeks now, and it seems to have just flowed from this.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Stay safe and happy photographing!

The photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone and Nikon D300 and 50mm Nikkor Lens. The musings are also my own, albeit inspired by the beauty of the flower.