While I was in England, I took around 4,000 photos. No, I'm not kidding. Since my return home, I try to spend a little time each day going through the photos. It isn't a task, really, because I enjoy looking at them and reliving the moments of my trip. I'm learning things about myself as I go through them. Odd things. Interesting things.One thing I've learned is I am strangely attracted to taking photographs of flowers growing where they shouldn't. I mean, I take the normal nature photographs in gardens and parks, but I seem to always find some obscure flower poking out of a crack in concrete or a small crevice in a rock. I can't tell you how many pictures I took of flowers growing out of street walls in England. Not exactly a big tourist attraction, if you know what I mean.
I am aware I am doing it, of course, I just didn't ask myself why until...someone else did. It was a fisherman in Newlyn - a true, blue, dressed-in-work-clothes-and-big-yellow-rubber-boots fisherman sitting on a bench by the side of the road. He didn't ask me why I was taking pictures of a wall. He couldn't. I was too busy taking photos. It was my friend, who was patiently waiting for me, he asked, "Does your friend like the wall?" She explained that I like the wall and the flowers. The man seemed puzzled, "Hasn't she seen a wall and flowers before?"My friend smiled and tried to give him a brief explanation. She told me about this little conversation after she'd gotten directions from the helpful fisherman, and we were continuing our walk to the next town.
I laughed when she told me and wondered how many good English people had wondered about the strange American woman taking pictures of odd things, laying on the ground to get a good shot of something, or speaking to her friends in "y'all"s and "ma'am"s. It wasn't until I'd been home awhile, and going through my photos, that I heard the fisherman's questions in my head again.
I began skimming through all my photos from the two weeks. In almost every set of outside photos, there they were - flowers growing in unlikely places! I'll be the first to say they weren't all good photos, but...I still liked them. In some cases, I had taken the "pretty" shot - including the flowers as background/foreground - before taking one of just the little flowers, focusing on them instead of the bigger picture. Just for me.
I decided to look at other trips I've taken in the past and found that I had the same type of pictures mixed in with those, as well. They weren't photos I took because I planned to frame them or show them to other people, I took them for my own pleasure. As I said, I liked them.
So,...the question I asked myself was, "Why?"
The answer came to me as I looked at picture after picture and began putting them all together in a group: I admire the little flowers. I truly admire them - not for their beauty (although I do find them beautiful), but for their strength and their endurance. They have not been cared for and cultivated in a garden. No one made sure they had the right amount of sunshine and water and fertilizer. Everything you see was brought forth by effort and stamina.After all these lovelies have been through - bad weather, heat, cold, and very little room for growth - they keep coming back every year. They lay dormant for a season (a rather long, cold season in England), but some part of them hangs on and pushes back through to bloom in due time. They don't even have a deep root system in which to depend on! It's funny, if you think about it. They thrive in a little dirt and dust between the cracks, adding softness and beauty to the rough landscape around them. They are quite determined to flourish, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
I think there's a lot of really good lessons in all that, don't you?
By the way, I have a bare wall in my new library room that needs some pictures. I wanted to have "just the right" photos from my travels to put on that wall, but...I'm thinking it's not always about hanging the perfect photo on the wall. Sometimes, it's a good idea to display perfect reminders about the importance of finding the beauty in life and learning to have "just the right" attitude about your circumstances, along with a good amount of determination and motivation to thrive.
