Day 1: It Begins With Flowers

Have you ever noticed that almost every budding photographer seems to begin with flowers?  (Those, and doors or doorways.)  I used to wonder why that is.  I was never a big flower-photographer, even back when I was ten or eleven and carrying my little 110 camera around with me, the kind that was long and thin and had little flashes you could buy to stick on top, rising up like little towers and expiring with each use.  I went for the animals in the zoo, and my family members, and the cat, and our pool, to name a few.  But it seems that most people who get their first 'proper camera', or these days an SLR, immediately go out to the back garden or stop on their way somewhere and bend down to get the petals, the colours, the angles of every tiny plant they see.

When I stopped to think about it on my walk today - as I passed thistles and several other flowers I couldn't name - I realised that there's a good reason that the new photographer, who is on a search for beauty and to share it with others, begins down low.  A flower captures so much of what beauty is all about.  When you're not looking for it, or when your mind is otherwise occupied, the flowers are just part of the scenery, and often are missed entirely.  They carpet the ground, or hide away in corners, or stand alone.  They blend in, and can be fairly unobtrusive.  But as soon as you begin to notice, and your eyes are opened, and you bend down or look over or even pluck one from the ground, flowers display more than you ever realised.  There are depths of beauty there you never imagined, colours that go together that you never would have thought of.  And it goes on, and on, and on.  You can see the beauty from afar if you look hard enough, but the closer you get the more amazing it becomes.  The detail overwhelms you.  The shapes are so different.  And you haven't even begun to comprehend how all that has come to be, how this miracle of beauty has risen from the ground with thirty or thirty thousand of its mates, each one exactly the same, each one entirely unique.

So, on my quest to particularly notice beauty each day, it makes sense that I, too, begin with the humble flower.  The thistle, no less, which represents the beauty of Scotland.  It's beautiful, but sharp.  It has difficult aspects too.  Like Scotland, with its highlands and rocks and mountains, and its lochs that extend to infinity, and its pastoral sheep scenes, its flowers that nod (or fiercely hurl themselves up and down) in the wind before castles, the thistle is intricate and immense, even in its tiny self.  It is sharp to the touch, resilient, strong.  When crushed, it rises up. "O flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again? That fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen, who stood against him, Proud Edward's army, and sent them homeward to think again."  

The fact is, I saw so much of what makes true beauty today.  The thistle, in the detail of its tiny self.  The sun, which broke out from the clouds and lit up the world before me, flowers and grass and trees and the road I walked on.  The early morning, where everything is fresh and new.  And the transient nature of it all, where in moments the light was gone and the flower's glory faded and the morning passing and the road seeming dull and long again.  Beauty, in this world, will always be transient.  "For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."  (2 Corinthians 4.18)

There is deep beauty behind what we can see.   It reminds me of the Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the evil witch in the story knows the deep magic, and binds the great king Aslan to it.  But he breaks through it and triumphs, and the children, confused, ask him what it all means.  "It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation."  When you look at the world around you, remember that there is a deeper magic, a deeper beauty than you can even see here.  Remember that those who are evil will take the beautiful and twist it for their own ends; or they will simply enjoy the beauty as though it is their own.  But you, if you are a lover and seeker of true beauty, can go further on and further in.  You can read a different incantation.