Escape

This is a picture of a leek blossom, just opening up. It’s actually a bundle of small flowers.

I like this picture because of its beauty. Part of that, to me, is the sense of things moving towards the right. There’s a tension, a leaning in that direction that makes it seem as if individual flowers are straining to move that way. The tilt of the blossom, the curve at the top of the casing, the loose spacing of the flowers at the right, all work to give this sense.

It looks as if the blossoms are bursting out, trying to escape and get away from the pod, like some alien capsule discharging its crowd of travelers after a very long voyage.

This sense of escape is something we can all identify with. Aren’t there times in our lives when we long to escape? It may be from the daily grind, from a bad job or relationship, from a disease or other uncomfortable situation.

However, while this illustrates the act of escaping, it shows nothing of where they are going.

Simply, the flowers are heading off into blackness. Is that necessarily better? Who knows what awaits them? Maybe continuing blackness, and it would have been better to stay. That’s the danger of being driven by the negative behind us, rather than a hope before us, ending up moving from futile to futile.

I can imagine the flowers spreading into the blackness, each isolated flower striving to make its own little bit of light, creating its own hope. If they can, then there would be many individual lights, like the beautiful sparkling canopy of stars on a crisp, cold night, fading away as they move apart.

But the original bloom was itself illuminated, and rather than spread away from that light, what if the flowers sought it out? Each would find an individual hope away from the pod but still linked to the others by reflecting the greater light. Instead of a cold starry night, imagine a warm sunlit meadow with everything growing together.

The result may be beautiful either way, but I think the idea of reflecting a warm light together best captures the vibrant, living beauty of the original scene.