"Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
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| Coral rose 6-17-14 |
"I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness --
and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day,
I'm a human trying to make it through in this world."
-- Ellen DeGeneres
"But this rose is an extra.
Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.
It is only goodness which gives extras,
and so I say again that we have much to hope for from the flowers."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
If only life had a "pause" button.
When too much is happening and its all just a confusing commotion of meaningless noise, wouldn't it be nice to be able to press pause and put it all on hold for just a little while?
The bang and clatter don't have to be coming from "out there," either. I've found that my inner racket can be louder and more bewildering than any external noise.
Yesterday the noise inside got a little overwhelming, so I poured myself a fizzy and went outside.
I sat at the patio table for a while and listened to the birds making a general fuss about things. I checked the progress of my vegetable garden: blooms on the zucchini and tomatoes, lovely florets on the broccoli, cauliflower doing nicely, peppers a little behind, weeds to be pulled, time to water.
I wandered around the backyard flower beds.
The coral rose bush was covered in tight little buds. But a couple of blooms were just beginning to uncoil. I grabbed my camera, just to see how they'd look through the viewfinder, and a beautiful thing happened.
The noise died down.
Life paused.
I spent I-don't-know-how-long looking at buds and blooms through the eye of my macro lens. My breathing slowed and evened out. My mind settled and quieted. The confusing cavalcade of anxious thoughts diffused into the blurry background as I focused close-up on a single something else.
I didn't look up until my camera battery died.
The birds were still making a fuss.
The weeds still needed to be pulled.
My inner racket was still rattling around in its cage.
But the volume was turned way down and the noise didn't bother me nearly as much.
Now, if only life had a "mute" button.
