The Beauty of Flowers While They Are Here

I love flowers. I love delighting in their different colours, textures and fragrances, and in what each one, and the combination of them, makes me feel.

Contemplating flowers, placing them in a vase at home or somewhere meaningful, observing them directly in nature, reminds me of the importance of appreciating the beauty of the moment. Of the biological need to reserve moments in our day for contemplation.

There is also something special about knowing that, the next day, they may already be different. They may have changed shape, lost some petals or the vividness that made them so attractive to our eyes. And yet, each stage has its own beauty.

It reminds me of the fragility of the present moment: the now, in the very next instant, is already the past. Of the importance, precisely because of this, of truly being present. Of being able to appreciate a flower despite the fragility of its constant transformation.

Not everyone can appreciate it, that is true. Perhaps because we are so often used to associating beauty with its peak, with what is whole, alive and exuberant. With what our eyes have learned to associate with perfection.

Perhaps it is harder for us to recognise beauty in something that is beginning to transform, slowly losing its vivid colour, its natural, upright form.

For me, flowers also embody a poetic fragility: the desire to preserve the now, accompanied by the awareness that the now cannot be preserved forever.

They embody the concept of beauty, which, in reality, carries a subjectivity that we do not always remember. What is beautiful to me may not be beautiful to you.

Yesterday, someone said to me:

“I really like flowers, they smell so good, but they wither so quickly. I never have them at home.”

And I replied:

“They’re beautiful for as long as they last. And we can make the most of that time.”

I kept thinking about that conversation.

There are beautiful things that last less time. It is true. But that touch us more deeply than many others that last a lifetime.

Perhaps the value of something does not lie in how long it lasts. Perhaps it also lies in what it allowed us to feel while it was with us.

Perhaps accepting that something will change or come to an end does not necessarily have to take away from the value of having experienced it.

And also… that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Flowers remind me of all of this, and so much more. Contemplating a flower is an experience in itself. And so, I do not need them to last forever. I can find beauty in appreciating them while they are here.

Perhaps it is the same with some moments, some conversations and some encounters. They do not need to last forever to have been important. There are things that pass through our lives for just a moment and, even so, leave something of themselves within us. They remain in our hearts, in our memories, in what we felt and in the way they touched our souls.

Perhaps that, too, is part of the beauty: being able to be truly present with what exists, while it exists.

With love 🌸

Daniela