Fading Flowers And Love
/Flowers From Beginning To End
“When you love life totally, how can you avoid death?
You have to love death also.
When you love a flower deeply, you love its withering away also.
When you love a woman deeply, you love her getting old also, you one day love her death also. That is part of her life, part of woman.
Old age has not happened from the outside, it has come from the inside. The beautiful face has become wrinkled now – you love those wrinkles also, they are part of your woman.
You love a man and his hair has grown white – you love those hairs also. They have not happened from the outside; they are not accidents.
Life is unfolding and now the black hair has disappeared and the gray hair has come. You don’t reject the gray hairs, you love them, they are a part of the man.
Then your man becomes old, becomes weak – you love that too.
Then one day the man or the woman is gone – you love that too. ”
What better teacher than Nature to capture the essence of birth and death and how love hums at the heart of it all?
Observing nature in my backyard, I decided to photograph the blossoming flowers. I positioned myself to capture their humble beginnings of greenery. Eager buds stretched forth as they pushed their way into the world. Twirling out of a spiral, they opened their petals to become the flower they were meant to be.
Everyone loves flower buds and blossoms.
As I documented their journey through the lens of my iPhone camera, I began to wonder – why isn’t the entire process considered beautiful?
I came upon this quote by Osho and it captured what I was feeling. He gets to the core of the issue. We can love the entire process from beginning to end. We don't have to be limited only to the parts that our limited minds deem to be pretty.
Even fading petals have a song to sing, don't they?
See the unfolding of the flowers in these photos:
Here, a flower opens its petals from within a spiral.
Now the flower opens wide in a blaze of color and a fire burns at its center.
The petals are shifting past their prime and begin to curl at the edges.
The flower fades further, petals crumple more.
The full glory of the flower is gone. One tenacious petal remains attached.
All the petals are gone. Only the glowing ember of a flower remains.
Love From Beginning To End
As flowers bloom, age and wither, beauty can be seen in all the steps of the process.
Love is at the heart of the journey. A love without judgment of whether they’re at the beginning or the end or how frazzled we look when it’s all over. We tap into natural cycles and the love that connects us all.
In our meditations, we become aware of the conditioning and judgments we place on ourselves regarding what we can or cannot love.
We allowed to love the birth, but not the death. Yet, the dying process is our ultimate journey on Earth. It's not about being in love with death itself, but rather, holding love through the “final” process that awaits all of us.
