Transformations

Have you ever watched a flower fade? My tulips are fading. I watch them everyday to see the beautiful colorful changes as they become the loveliest colors I could ever behold. I watch the dull pink flower make it’s transformation to a multi colored bloom, becoming shiny, and soft, light and dark, streaked and lovely, all at once, and I imagine a room painted just that color, but it isn’t one color, or one sheen, but many, so exquisite I cannot tell you, but I have photographed them most everyday.


The petals twist and turn, and the once tulip is then transformed into another plant completely. The petals fall, and small black and yellow seeds are left studding the piston. I collect the seeds carefully. In three years they will each become a bulb, the ones that make it, that is, and each bulb a unique variety that has never been seen before.




It brings to mind the small ivory hand of my grandmother as she lay dying, Skin so exquisitely thin it looked like some delicate almost sheer cloth laid over her small bones, draped there, revealing an uncommon beauty.
Beauty comes in so many ways, and we don’t see it most of the time, we are too busy trying to preserve what we have decided is beautiful to allow maturity to manifest itself, in beauty, and look upon it for the wonder it is.

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft, and to thy slender store, two loaves alone to thee are left. Sell one, and with the dole, buy hycinths, to feed they soul! ( unknown poet)