A Sunday communion, written on the actual Sunday after a longer time of absence.
Earlier this year I bought a macro lens for the oldest camera I own, a Nikon that belonged to my uncle and was gifted to me when I started my photography studies. The camera is completely manual, very simple to use and has seen a lot. In a way it feels like an object that carried wisdom from one generation to the next and I felt like I needed that guidance from another era right now .
Macro lenses are owned by old men, so thats where I got mine. An older man from facebook marketplace sold me my new tool to look at the world more closely. He had used it to photograph watches back in the day and also told me about his six children and the change in the industry. I always find it refreshing to talk to older creatives because I feel its rare to encounter them in real life, to learn from their experience. Most of the time there seems to be a generational divide (unintentionally) where we all hangout in our own ecosystems to discuss how to have a long, happy, creative lives without the role models to prove its possible.
Every time I come home from traveling one of the first things I do is inspect our garden. As it’s mostly kept in a wild state in my absence its fascinating to see what it does when you do not look, like Schroedingers cat in a botanic form the possibilities are endless. And as everything in nature it returns to a beautiful orchestrated chaos. Flowers appear where you never planted them, the ones you carefully raised from a small seed disappear completely, random things return from last year, other things spill over from the neighbours. This year I decided to lean into the disorder, plant less and watch more.
My girlfriend is on her gap year and she loves flowers so I thought its a good way to turn my watchful eye into a photograph so she can see into our garden up close from afar.
I feel wise old people like our grandparents had this knowledge for a long time but plants are truly magic, beautifully constructed in all the perfect ways. When you see them at different times of day, throughout the weeks and months you can grasp that they are very much alive. Not alive in a sense that they grow mindlessly in a trial and error errand or that they just repeat a pattern given to them by their DNA (which by the way contains a lot more genes than human DNA). They know they are here interacting to what is around them, they probably know you exist and who knows maybe they even enjoy being looked at and having their portrait taken.
Watching the garden is watching a great web of connection, the closer you go the more you see how all the parts even on this small piece of land work together. The spiders, the ants, the flowers, the fruit, the greenery, the trees, the snails, the birds, the foxes, the bees, the flies, the human. The tiny city eco system right behind my house, working perfectly while not worrying about perfection at all. A disordered sanctuary to the urban mind to watch and learn what we might have forgotten.
My most emotional plant experience this summer I had with a sunflower that Alex and me planted before she left. From its first growing as a small seed it did not seem like a resilient plant, a bit fragile I transferred it into our garden soil and left it to the garden to take care of it. A few weeks later when I returned from a trip I noticed that it wasn’t hanging on to the stick that I had put next to it to support it so now it had a snapped stem. Wondering if I should put it out of its misery and just take it out, my wandering mind swiftly moved to another task to take care of. The sunflower survived that day. And all other days. The next time I looked for it I could see it had repaired itself. Now slightly crooked but alive. The sunflower knows how to puts itself back together.
This experience of looking at things closer again has lead me to the question if everything is a lot more conscious than we might assume. Maybe we are too busy now to truly look at the things growing around us. What can we learn from another living entity when we get down to ground level? What can it learn from us? I believe it is this exchange we lost somewhere along the road to an ever increasing fast paced life. The very small, the silent, the slow, the fragile has something for us if we cut through the noise. We,too can put ourselves back together.
I hope you enjoyed these Sunday thoughts and plant portraits. May we walk into each other soon, say hi via email, I love hearing from you! To Alex, I hope you found pleasure in the flower show of our garden <3
SUNDAY RECOMMENDATIONS
BOOKS
Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The perfect books for people who want to know more about small things from someone that truly knows, the fantastic Robin Wall Kimmerer.
All about love, communion and salvation by bell hooks
I finally finished this trilogy of bell hooks wisdom on love. An analysis of the personal struggle with a complicated matter aswell as a view on societies larger problems in love through a lens of race and gender.
And now I need everyone else to read it so we can talk about it.
PODCAST
On Being with Joanna Macy
I listened to this in the perfect setting, when a thunderstorm had just passed and me and Alex were in bed in complete darkness after a power cut. I need to re-listen to it again to know if its the memory or the actual episode that makes me remember this as one of my most favourite audio experiences of all time.
Two classic Radiolab episodes that I recently listened to more than 10 years past their first airtime they are still as weird as they are wonderful.
MUSIC
The beautiful cover version of All flowers in time by Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley this newsletter is named after