On assignment to cover this thing called life, writing with my former student: Flowers
The Assignment: I am on assignment to cover this thing called life, writing with Ariel Rose, a former student of mine. She is a bomb writer, damn that girl and her words—I hope she publishes one day. This all started when she posted on FB the other day…if only I could get myself to start writing again…to which I commented, it’s due on Friday, 500 words, then added, actually, let’s do it together.
I have been thinking about flowers and the spiral of ways they’ve shown up this week.
The brush plant outside the parking lot at work that is mostly woody parts but has two tufts of leaves, small, green, and some fuchsia pink flowers and the hummingbird, its head the same color as the flowers and its body feathers the same color as the foilage, that landed there just before the dogs and I walked on by, and how my cousin commented on the same plant a couple of days later, saying it’s kind of a cool plant, isn’t it? it’s kind of like the desert, isn’t it? I hadn’t said anything to him about the shrub or the hummingbird, but you know, we were raised by naturalists.
The floral memorial on the sidewalk I came home to last Friday for the woman who jumped off our roof garden on Wednesday.
The flowers in the podcast my friend Cecily sent me—Windowsill Chats—the episode was a chat with Mary Jo Hoffman who takes a photograph every day of what she calls found nature. She has held this practice for a decade and her work is now a book. In the podcast she spoke of photographing while traveling and of bioregions—this woman spoke of bioregions, just threw the term out there like we should all know what it means, and I thought, you go girl—we all should.
She talked about being somewhere outside of America and photographing in a way that showed seasonality and remarked that people living there orient toward seasonality, “People in those bioregions understand the seasons, but here in America…” I don’t remember how she finished her sentence but I finished it thinking, we hedonistically think the weather is for our fun, not part of the living system of the planet that keeps us all alive.
But I liked that she was informing people of environmental concepts through her photography.
I’ve been thinking about bioregionalism a lot lately and what I want to write about it.
How last Saturday I turned my orchid in the windowsill so it gets even sunlight. The orchid a gift from my yoga teacher for assisting her in this year’s yoga teacher training.
I, too, have a decade’s worth of photographs that can become a book. Note to self—get on this.
