something beautiful enough to change you
something beautiful enough to change you
a morning spent staring at flowers
I examine the pinks, the blues, the purples, the soft harmony adorned to a bouquet of this caliber. The colors are so soft, so vivid. The array of shades and intensities is at once life-affirming and heart-breaking. All of these flowers bunched together, giving their all. Performing an elaborate exhale.
We are watching them at their peak. The sadness that leaks within this performance is that all at once they burst, yet one by one they will diminish, and disperse. Leaving trails of death behind, scattered around the vase.
I don’t like being reminded of this fate, but the beauty is so captivating I can’t take my eyes off of them. I’ve brought a chair over just to sit and watch this orchestra of demise. This final bloom. They are dying and you wouldn’t even know it. Their colors are too powerful for you to guess. But, they are and they will be. However, take your hand to the violet blush petal and you will notice its lack of moisture. Its imminent fall and retreat.
It is truly amazing how they all got to be here. All in different sizes and shapes. They are a family that cocoons together. They did not enter this world in unison but they will leave it, so. In this cluster they will meet the void. I look at them and if it wasn’t for my logical mind I would believe them to be singing. The outstretched petals opening their centers look like grand drawings of breath. An operatic finale. What a gorgeous chorus living in my vase. For an audience of one. Maybe, two. If a friend comes along to visit me. Even alone they will die in honor. Knowing they gave their very best. This disorganized family all cut at the stem.
I think just by looking at them these flowers are changing me. What I would do to help them survive. I wish flowers could live as long as humans. Or, at least get the chance to. But, maybe their beauty wouldn’t be quite like this. Given the bloom would then take much longer. Their final bow wouldn’t be as quick. Their colors would take longer to activate. Their buds would be painfully slow in their release. Just getting them into a state to be cut and put in a vase may take 40 years. Would we be patient enough for them?
Am I patient enough for myself?
I look at the bouquet one last time. Now, my eyes are more at rest. More accepting. Understanding. I’m not trying to drink as much of them in my view as a way to somehow preserve them. Their lives have already entered my blood. They will be somehow eternal in that sense.
I wrote the flowers into me.
I spent 20 minutes surveying the beauty of my flowers and now in everything a certain beauty is being revealed. It is unavoidable. It is chasing me. The song I was listening to rang into a tune I registered as similar to the caliber of beauty I had just witnessed. And now I’m in tears closing my eyes as I smother almond butter on my breakfast toast.
God, what door has opened? What dimension have I arrived to? I am understanding more and more beauty is a state of mind. Not something that can be done to you or as a result. It’s a way of believing in something so much you will allow it to alter you.