Thursday, July 2, 2009

the beautiful usurper



sometimes life is one big tangled up messy thing isn't it?! more often than not, (knot?!) when it's all untangled you see it for what it is - a thing of convoluted beauty. beauty being in the eye of the beholder of course, ' cause beauty can look like a mistake (brian eno would say "honour your error as a hidden intention"), a complete mess-up that teaches you something (ditto previous perspective from brian), a glorious success, or even just a messy thing of tangled-up beauty!

a few years ago i went to a greenhouse / gardening centre out in the country. all sorts of beautiful, glorious, pretty plants were there. it was overflowing with plants. i left with what i went for - wild grasses to plant in a bed made up of river pebbles. i also left with what i wanted as soon as i saw them.

this is how i am made: i plan to be unplanned. i prepare to be spontaneous. i organize to allow for disorganization.

i put some lilies in . . .

that manage to look lovely even when they fall to the pebbles below . . .



and all the while the grasses grow . . .

and the sun rises . . .

and the sun sets . . .

and the grasses grow . . .


but there's a usurper - a beautiful usurper with designs on the whole bed . . . a thing of tangled-up beauty . . . .



the spiderwort.

whose flowers make their world-dominating designs worthwhile - i'll give up order for beauty any day!

2 comments:

Delwyn said...

Hi Steven

the spiderwort is very pretty - it's all sort of knotted up too.

In the past I have disliked native grasses but now I realise that I had never really looked at them...Some can have beautiful tiny flowers and others magnificent seed heads like yours.

I adhere to the philosophy that life is chaos but in that chaos and unpredictability there is also in places order and beauty, structure and security...

Happy days

steven said...

hi delwyn, i agree with your sense that life is chaos and that in that chaos there is order and beauty. i think there are confluences in the chaos that resolve as what we know as order. i think sometimes we will those confluences to form. other times i think we miss the order by becoming focussed on the surface of things which seems to have an order about it. still other times - a look across a room that resolves in a partnership for example - we see through the chaos to the deep-mapped order and hey!! there it is!! steven