TheBanyanTree: Petal

[Maria Gibson]

I love flowers.  They can grow and thrive even as ugliness and flith is
all around them, they can maintain beauty despite their surroundings.
They thrive even in the very most loving and tended environment.
Flowers are amazingly adaptive.

I like them best after they're cut, vased and left to wilt.  The water
slowly disipates and the heads begin to droop a little and then a lot.
Colors begin to deepen and fade at the same time and shriveling brings a
reduction but to my eye reduces them not.  For me they hold a dignity in
that state that cannot be acheived at any other time.  Whatever pose the
stalk and flower heads take on when this happens, they keep.  They
aren't any more dead than when they were cut from the life blood and
forced, unnaturally, into a water holding vesel and admired and revered
out of their element.  Only now they can show their true feelings about
it all.  I find their silent repose, faces twisted and yawning, drawfed
and bent bodies lost in rigor to be strangley and deeply compelling.

There is something to learn there.

Maria