in the green fingers
stretching to reach
the blue sky
i look at the flowers
that hold a strange
kind of wisdom
in their unreflective beauty
and resistance to change
It is not a controversial statement, I think, to say that we live in a time of radical change. Yes, change has always been there, and life has always moved on. But in the past we were not made aware of this fact on a 24 hour basis. Again, obviously in the past people knew that there was change, the philosophers of old contemplated this very thing. But today we are so connected to the whole world's news and changes, that we experience change, in my opinion, differently.
We are made aware of change on a constant basis.
Not only are we constantly hearing about new news stories around the world, the very thing we use to see this news is constantly changing. There are new versions of everything being released every single day, new models being released each year. I am still using a DSLR camera from 2007, with a 50mm lens from pre 2000s. If I could, I would not change this.
But it is sadly our fate today to change at such a dizzying and constant rate I have lost track of most things in my life - the ship has sailed on so many things.
While walking in the garden one morning, looking at some flowers that succumbed to the fate of a hungry bug, it really struck me again:
Does the wisdom of the flower
not lie in its constant willingness
to undergo change?
 |  |  |
|---|
From seed, to seedling, to flower, to decay, the flower is always changing. In the flower is the wisdom and resilience we need to cope with our lives today, or so I felt when I looked at the flower, half eaten by some bug. It was a yellow flower (one that I share below) and I looked at it while I looked at the mountains on the horizon, listening to birds in distance, feeling the presence of everything buzzing around me.
I think there is wisdom hiding in the flower's resistance to decay after the bug ate almost most of it. Still, it flowers, it blooms, even though most if it has been eaten. And is this not a beautiful metaphor for our lives today, bombarded with new news stories about all of the horrific things happening in the world? Why not stand up, after being metaphorically eaten by these bugs, to keep on blooming in the sun, even if our petals does not show as beautiful as previously?
But the wisdom I have somehow found in the flowers is not restricted to it. Flowers are part of plants, they are not separated. The flower that I found so interesting is attached to a rather big shrub, with thousands of leaves, also eaten by bugs, broken by constant moving around it, and by birds and other creatures that move in, through, and around it.
So can we speak about Wisdom of the Leaves?
In a crowd we kind of lose some of our individuality. We become part of the whole, the crowd, the mass. Leaves are individual, but collected they become the tree, the shrub, the bush, and we lose sight of the individual leave to see the whole. Even though the whole is made up of the individual, there is security in the whole that the individual cannot have. I look at the shrub with its many leaves crisscrossing each other, and it struck me: by blending in, and not totally losing our individuality, we become stronger.
Our modern Western world has normalised individuality to such an extent that knowing the people around you have become extinct. Our neighborhoods are structured in such a way that we do not know the people living next door. (This is obviously not the case for everyone.) A sense of community is missing; we look at most people with a kind of skepticism: will they hurt me? Rather than looking at them with friendliness, we see in them the will to somehow destroy me.
There is a type of violence and disturbance in being unsettled by a flower. I look at these vulnerable petals blowing in the wind, being eaten by bugs, and standing out from the security of the crowd (of leaves).
But there is beauty in that unsettling thoughts.
Maybe I am overthinking it, but I also think that overthinkers are the only ones that might gain something from looking at a flower this long.
I hope that you enjoyed these photographs and that you were somewhat unsettled by the musings.
For now, happy photographing.
All of the photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and 50mm Nikkor lens. The musings are my own, albeit inspired by these flowers and leaves with their inherent wisdom.