The Undersides of Flowers
Sometimes the cherry blossoms tessellate, rotating slowly, inviting your head to tilt to one side or the other, as if the whole world were moving with them. You trace the outlines of their petals for a few breaths, following them into the in-between you’ve created in your mind. You look up and they coalesce at the meridian like mirror images, joining and separating again in a way that makes you question what’s real. All the while you know they’re only an overlay on a world you’d prefer not to live in.
Other times flowers blur, come into focus, then more quickly blur and come into focus again. Occasionally there’s a fraction of a pause before that final moment of clarity, as if you, through this lens, moved forward into the blur to orient yourself there so you could pull yourself back out.
You feel yourself falling into a dreamlike state, one that avows to mirror the world we live in currently, one in which dreams and reality are transposed and inverted. All too suddenly we’ve found ourselves not knowing which is which or what our dreams are or in fact, who we are. All of the plans you’d made for your future wilt and fall away, and with them the humanness of the endeavor. We grieve this loss of plans; though they were never more than figments of our future selves, we’d so intertwined them with our identities, the stories we told ourselves about who we were becoming, that we forgot how to move in the world with only the present to hold.
It’s early spring. You move your body to frame the subject, to find the right composition, and if you can’t, you move on. You looked for what the eye is drawn to and noticed what the soul is instead: Perfect depth of field. The tops of blossoms glittering at noon, lit from above. Lines — most of all those that draw you forward. The softness of a branch of blossoms, some chimeric quality of the light and the delicacy of the flowers that you try to pull out so others can see it too. Having noticed those, you start to notice other, tangible parts of your environment: A row of trees lining your path. One tiny bud amidst adult blossoms. Your favorite flowers in the distance. A whole park.
From under a royal star magnolia tree, whose blossoms make for worthy subjects, you find yourself fascinated by the undersides of flowers, the unseen becoming all you see. The sepals look uncertain of their aliveness, dedicated to protecting the flowers as they bloom. The branches to which they’re attached form natural fractals, the pattern of life.
In an instant you consider going back to your plans. This exhausts you. You stay past when you felt you should leave but didn’t want to, noticing what feels right to you in the moment and choosing to do that. This is the way forward now, and maybe forever. You notice the light on the petals, find stillness, breathe in the air, look at the sky and close your eyes. You open them again and bring the world into focus.
When your eyes have been closed with sunbeams shining onto your eyelids, at the moment you blink them open, the world is blue.
