Nature's Time
By Michael Erlewine
If you are a photographer of plants and flowers as I am, and its already past the Spring Equinox, it’s easy to use the advancing spring flowers as a kind of thermometer as to my desire to photograph. I feel time slipping away as one flower after another arises, finishes up, and is gone while I am still trying to get out there and photograph it.
The whole thing has got to be funny. Anything less than that and we are into tragedy. LOL.
This year I did not manage to photograph the Blood Root flowers or the Spring Beauty, which I always used to take photos of. What’s the problem?
For one, I have a lot of mundane busyness going on, what with health problems, repair and maintenance requirements, exercise demands, health food issues, and on and on.
Nature’s time clock runs on schedule and offers up the flowers and frogs of spring pretty much on time, perhaps this spring a little colder and higher winds than I remember, but still like clockwork.
It’s me that’s falling behind the tempo, dragging myself behind, and not keeping up with the schedule of spring. The sands of time seem to slip through my fingers and I’m not keeping up.
It’s not like I need any more photos of the Blood Root flowers. I have tons already. It’s that this small event, the early Blood Root blooms, are heralds of spring, as are the first raspy sound of the Chorus Frogs or the croaks of the Wood Frogs.
They help me tell internal time to myself, to witness the passing of a chain of flowers and events that follows a strict schedule that I now miss and am missing.
Oh yes, I’m still marking time but just in a different way now. So much is just passing me by, and I can’t seem to get myself out there as a witness and photograph as I used to.
I know (I’m aware) of what I am missing and yet I continue to miss it, and not on purpose. As they say, I’m a victim of my own circumstances.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.