A busy insect in a profusion of disorganized blooms. We think of flowers as things with stems that fit into vases, but those are actually the exception. Flowers are also sloppy jumbles of things that happen in limitless number, accomplishing in the process their purpose and their goal. This insect is proof of the effectiveness of such flowers. Perhaps they also smell good, though smell and photographs do not go hand in hand. If their smell is irresistible, then their appearance as photographed is secondary. My father used night blooming jasmine only once or twice in his designs, for people who insisted upon jasmine. He hated the smell. For my part, I absolutely adore the smell. If I could have night blooming jasmine in my bedroom I would sleep soundly every night. It has the odor of peacefulness and rest. But the purpose of a flower’s smell is to attract insects, to propagate. You’d think that jasmine would be covered with insects top to bottom. But for the life of me, I don’t remember insects. I remember — as I close my eyes — the smell of jasmine. Pure and simple. Of course, I’m not an insect.
 


Normally attributed to Mies van der Rohe, because of the New York Times 1969 obituary. But sometimes there are so many details that one becomes lost. Old nails, old paint and spiderwebs. Even on Mies van der Rohe constructions. But nothing so terrible as this. A detail from my balcony. Something I ignore at all costs. It’s there and not there. A patchwork of unimportant detail. And yet, the closer I look the more bedeviled I become. The world is a matter of perspective.
 



These plants have just gone on being themselves for quite some time. Leaves and refuse have accumulated around them, but they are undeterred. Every so often I see something that is almost perfect, and it requires a good long look. Enjoy.
 


This flower is only a bit larger than my thumb. It’s part of a hedge hanging over a fence toward the sidewalk. I was going to say hundreds, but I suspect it has thousands of such blooms, and not one of them perfect. It’s the kind of thing that closeness rewards. I know almost nothing about flower anatomy, beyond what I learned in junior high school. Pistil, stamen, petal, ovary. But I think the mystery of flowers is more important than their botany. Yes, flowers have a sex life, and that’s important up to a point. Our brain requires that. But our heart, if we allow it to, feels the tug and pull of the flower’s… What shall we say, spiritual dimension? The brain and the heart are not enemies, but they live together with difficulty. The brain rejects the spiritual, and the heart holds a hand against the brain. But rational and irrational are not opposites.
 



Like an endless field of repeating flowers. One hedge wide and one hedge long. Enough to get lost in. But I’ve noticed that almost everyone walking past fails to notice. It’s an odd world in which nothing is beautiful. These same people go home as directly as possible to stare at television. To watch commercials. To listen to sales pitches. To pretend that what they are watching is worth seeing. When they have already abandoned sight. When they see their way home to open their eyes and see nothing. It’s an odd world, one that flowers, but is not seen.
 


I’ve written elsewhere, see Stars and Constellations, about how the people around here are generally ignorant of planets and constellations. I credit that to the prevalence of fog and overcast skies, though I may have been a bit charitable in that regard. Tonight I walked 25 minutes down hill in the cold from the market home. Since being in the hospital I walk much slower than I did. I mention this because for 25 minutes I watched Venus glow and glare above Morro Rock, the core of an ancient volcano sitting just off the coast. I watched it decline in the sky until I reached home and ran for warmth. This was the view near the beginning of my walk home over the library parking lot with trees and power poles in the way. Of course the same view is available everywhere, except, I suppose, the southernmost reaches where the sun itself has ceased to be visible. The sun sank behind Morro Rock, allowing Venus to shine a bit brighter than it might.

Of course Astrology has provided us with unlimited interpretations of this phenomenon. Here’s one example from Tarot.com:
When it comes to love and money, Venus is the place to look. Yes, transits, progressions and eclipses to your natal Venus will be the major markers to look out for in anticipation of a major shift in money and romantic matters. But to add even more depth of flavor to your analysis, it's a good idea to look at your Venus Return chart each year.
We can see the broad outlines of the story of Satan in the activity of Venus, if our minds are open. One of the various names for Satan is Lucifer. Lucifer means something akin to brightness. Venus reaches its brightest point before falling from the sky. The fall of Satan is an important subject in Christianity. It falls from the night sky and is “reborn” in the morning sky. From there it rises, becomes dimmer and dimmer until it finally passes behind the sun and disappears. In a sense, then, Satan is chased away, only to return. This story is hidden in the New Testament without mentioning Venus.

To imagine all this you must visualize Venus as having an orbit between the earth and the sun. It can rise from the sun as a dim spec of light, grow in size, grow very bright, though by then, like the moon it is only a crescent because it is nearing the sun, and then continue between the earth and sun until it disappears. It cannot appear in midheaven or in the eastern sky. Of course, it then continues into the morning sky, rising before the sun and eventually passing behind it.

The Transit of Venus is a very rare occurrence when as Venus passes from the night to morning it passes directly through the disc of the sun. This last happened in 2004 and eight years later in 2012. It will not happen again 2117. These transits provided Shirley Hazzard with the backdrop for a novel, Transit of Venus in 1980. A novel that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction among many others. A wonderful novel that was nonetheless difficult to read. I recommend it to those who don’t mind difficult books that are worth the effort.

On a humorous note, I received a phone call a number of years ago from a psychiatrist friend. He was standing in the parking lot of the hospital looking at something in the eastern (by which he meant western) sky and it hadn't moved for at least ten minutes. It's close to the zenith (which it might be if his head were tilted, or if that's where he expected it to be) and I should go outside at once and look in his direction. He was almost positive he was looking at a flying saucer. He didn't believe my explanation about Venus, and still tells people that flying saucers are real because he has seen them (them) himself.

All this aside, Venus will be in the early evening sky for a while now. It has just surpassed the sun and will climb and become brighter as it does so and then astonish us as it disappears. It will be bright enough to peek through a light fog (if you live in Morro Bay) or it will seem to light the sky if you live where the sky is clear. And then it won't be there. Pay attention. You may enjoy this.
 



I should look up more often when I walk. I have a mild fear of falling, so I’m always careful where my feet go. Fortunately, the flowers that I snap, generally speaking, are close to my feet, so I don’t have the impression that I’m missing much. Not until I stop to take a breath near sunset and realize that things have been going on in the sky without me. This was a spectacular cloud that had no purpose that I could tell. It came at the end of day announcing, I suppose, beauty. That’s all I discerned. There were no other clouds in the sky to speak of. There was no rain and not much humidity. The late afternoon sun had nothing to catch besides this strangely twisted and oddly temporary cloud. Had I made it home without looking up, it would have been gone. But today it called out and I responded. How much else, I wonder, have I missed?
 


This is the tiniest scrap of minuscule flowers in a portion of what was once the garden at the Yoga Center. Parts of it are covered in leaves and debris. As I understand it, though I don’t know this for a fact, this represents an emergency backup plan where a piece of root severed from its plant sends up a sudden bloom. A last ditch effort to reproduce. Humans, of course, lack this capacity. Our gestation period wanders through the seasons, and when the going gets tough, we tend just to die. There are many more plants than humans on the earth.

I will use this opportunity to pass on a bit of gossip delivered to me by a neighbor. It wasn’t a gardener who hacked away at the plants for the landlord, it was a group of forty or more people who came one day while I was in the hospital to dig up and replant what was once the Yoga Center garden. People who value plants and probably yoga, who will donate back the plants when the time comes, or else their offspring. The Yoga Center has a temporary home and is negotiating (at least talking with the city about) a city owned empty structure not far from here that was once a restaurant, but hasn’t been occupied for several years. It would give them lots of room and at least a minimal garden area. It would also be much more visible than their present temporary location. I wish them luck, and trust that their success will radiate throughout the community.
 


I pass this way every six weeks or so. It’s on the way I walk to the barber shop. I hate haircuts enough that I pretend I’m doing almost anything else. I focus on getting there and on the way I block out almost everything else for fear that I won’t get there at all. And when I noticed this to the left of me about a block from home, I almost forgot about haircuts. I seem to have posted a neighboring flower of tyis type on the fourth of this month in Speak the Speech I Pray You. But I don't think one can look too often at such things. This is a stupendous bloom. Or, I should say, these are stupendous. They seem unnecessarily complex for such a forgettable shrub. But this is why shrubs continue, I suppose. It’s almost as if something tropical and exotic got accidentally crossed with something about to be tossed out. An ordinary bush with world class flowers. Large puffy things. Brightly colored. Absolutely mysterious. I looked for the longest time before remembering why I happened to be there.
 


I’ve called a number of flowers daisy like, but this, I think, is actually a daisy. Of course, I could be wrong. There’s a tiny bug on the far right petal and up one. I found the bug when I looked closely at the photograph. All of the flowers look to be in similar condition, by which I mean not perfect, and this leads me to believe that it’s typical of this variety. It’s in a strip with a sprinkler system, so it gets plenty of water. I think I snapped this picture as a reminder to find out what the limits of daisies are. And having pursued that question for a few minutes on Wikipedia, I realize that daisies could be a lifetime study — there is absolutely no end to them. They come in all colors and proportions imaginable. Of course, my personal study consists of those growing on my walk to the store and back, and even then there seem too many to master. Bellis perennis, or the common daisy, according to Wikipedia, is often considered to be an invasive weed. To which I say, more Bellis perennis.
 



Things exposed after cleaning up of the church yard. This deserves a yard of its own, or at least its own walkway surrounding it. I could have cleaned around it a bit, but this is what there was after they hacked and hauled the weeds and cut down the boughs that hung down hiding things. It was a mess that I simply walked past before. Now it is filled with miracles such as this.
 

 


If you were a flower designer, somewhere on the way from daisies to orchids would be this one, but closer to orchids than to daisies. It seems irresistibly complex, and yet simple and approachable. Every movement has its opposite, every flourish its compliment. There’s an equation here that we cannot see exactly, but one we feel with clarity. White, lavender, gold, and brown. This is a flower being all that a flower can be.
 


I’ve walked past this a hundred times without quite seeing it. I think it was the late afternoon flash of light that caught my eye. There is so much happening, and yet so little of seeming value or importance. This is a picture of sunlight and what it does. One beam changes everything.
 


Pushing out over the sidewalk and dead leaves. I’m reminded of a study done more than fifty years ago that monitored eye movement over photographs. One of the more interesting results involved fishnet stockings and specifically men’s eyes. Women responded quite differently. Women seemed to assess the legs, moving up and down the central portion where more of the leg was visible. But men’s eyes went almost immediately to the periphery, the edge where the fishnet pattern started to condense. Men saw the outline of the leg more than the leg itself, and they did this not just a small percentage of the time, but almost the entire time. So, perhaps when I see plants growing over the edge of the sidewalk, I’m seeing with masculine eyes. When we planted the patio a few months ago, I made sure to plant some of the starters close enough to the edge that they would grow over it and onto the patio. In my mind, that would give them something that they otherwise lacked. I didn’t think about it, it was just something I did. But now that I do, I think it is the edge itself which is most visible, where the eye is drawn. At least, where my eye is drawn. Like this leftover bloom on the edge of the sidewalk.
 


This is a picture of Marta, my favorite nurse, excepting all the other favorites, of course. She got me where the others failed, in the funny bone. She has a very serious demeanor that mixes unexpectedly with a delightful smile. The first day I was in the hospital I asked where she was from. She said, rather playfully, “Where do you think I’m from.” Well, she seemed tall, thin, had an interesting complexion with a base of freckles — at least I thought she did — and a reddish tint to her hair. She also had an accent that sounded vaguely north European. I thought I was on solid ground. “Norway,” I said. “Nope,” she replied in a thin, but distinct accent. She stood waiting for my next guess. I reached down deep and said, “Czechoslovakia.” She laughed out loud and said, as she left the room, “You need a map.”

It turns out there is no Czechoslovakia. In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Chech Republic and Slovakia. So, look all you want on a map, you won’t find it. But I needed one to figure that out. That or Google, of course. Marta came from the Czech Republic, a country steeped in mystery and beauty. But not a bad second guess, if you ask me.

I know neither her maiden name nor her married name. The hospital tries to protect the identity of its nurses or else it tries to maintain a casual, first-name atmosphere… or both. I remember getting a haircut from someone named Skipper years ago. It wasn’t his first name, or even his title, but a name issued by the salon. He was, in effect, the Skipper on duty. I think that lasted until the first state inspector realized all the names on all the licenses were covered over.

The picture above seems like an odd one to run with this post. It looks like I should have allowed her to get all the way into the room. But she’s not entering the room, she’s backing out, and hiding behind her computer. Of course, there could be something nefarious going on. She could be hiding in America to conceal high crimes and Czech misdemeanors, laying low as a nurse, a mother and a wife until whatever it was blows over. But somehow I doubt that. I think she’s in complete control, I just think she’s camera shy.

So I’ll leave Marta shrouded in mystery an beauty to tell you the only story I know about her homeland. It’s been told a thousand times. I’ll give you the shortest version I that I can. A woman dies and meets St. Peter at the pearly gates. She’s very tense about getting into heaven. St. Peter says, “Not to worry. Spell one simple word and you’re in. The word is L O V E.” After she does that he asks her to take his place for a few minutes. She notices her husband in line and finds out he died on the way home from the funeral in a flaming car crash. He too is worried about getting into heaven. She says, “Not to worry. Spell one simple word and you’re in.” “Oh, thank God,” he says. “And what word is that?”

“C Z C H O S L O V A K I A.”
 


A month ago in Mystery Fruit I couldn’t decide if I was looking at seed pods or flowers. Today the flowers, if that’s what they were in fact, are gone and what seems likely to be seed pods have appeared. I looked at this for a long time before realizing that I had taken a picture of it in full bloom. It could be the very same cluster. Nature’s propensity for diversity in reproduction is astounding. We humans do all sorts of things around the notion and activity of reproduction, though reproduction itself remains very simple and direct. We are not bees flying from flower to flower. We fall in love, have sex, have babies, and the seasons roll on.
 


This is the most mesmerizing flower I have ever tried to look at. Yes, it has little flaws on the outer edge, but those only cause you to relax. To fall slowly. Into the center. I find this an amazing flower and, as you can see once again, a singular flower in the middle of absolutely nothing. I have to force myself to stop looking. The center is so deep and far away. A kind of portal. But where is it taking us?
 


There is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to quality nurses, even if the barrel they come in has one or two that fall somehow short. Bea was not one who left anything to be desired. She used a magical touch to dissolve problems. She turned a horrendously bad day into a happy, memorable one. And she did that quickly and quietly as if there were nothing easier. Perhaps there was nothing easier for her.

Bea lives about twenty minutes from the hospital, and about twenty minutes from where I am typing this. If I see her again, I hope it’s at the market, not at the hospital. She is the mother of two and a loving wife. She seems to be going in many directions at once. But she cuts right through to the necessity of things with a disarming smile, which is my idea of the ideal nurse. She comes from an extended Latina family with brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts, and her husband is a handyman covering a number of cities or towns including the one I live in. I have a family that barely exists, so I truly enjoy hearing about kids and husbands and all that.

She didn’t come to see if I needed anything, she came to see how I was doing. And every time she asked, I felt a tiny bit better. It didn’t last, but it lasted for two wonderful days, which is why I’m posting this picture and writing this blog. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but I must say that Bea has a very nice cover. I hate the nurse who sent my post surgical lunch back for a bowl of soup, and then left the person who had had no food and almost no water for eighteen hours to wait one more hour for see-through broth. But I felt that Bea was incapable of such insensitivity. She listened to me complain for a good ten minutes and then said, “Well, let’s solve that problem.”

I read these words and realize they seem nothing like the memories that I have barely captured. Good things are like that.
 


These are on a tree hanging down over the sidewalk by the library. Because I’m not a botanist or even an accomplished gardener this is all very confusing to me, except that it’s the tree’s reproductive cycle at work. I would have guessed that the “pods” on the upper left were seed pods, but they seem to be budding flowers. The seed pods appear to be the empty things on the lower right. At least the flowering part is gone and seeds will be forming in what’s left. The whole thing seems very strange to me, but so much of the tree turns red that it’s impossible not to notice. The afternoon light caught these blooms at just the right moment. Such a world we live in.
 


I could be wrong, but I think these are pieces of geraniums struggling to exist. They have produced random blooms rather than clusters, which are the result of the last haphazard cleaning of a corner of the church grounds. They hacked most of the plants down but left the roots and parts of the old stems. The life force in geraniums must be very strong. If they don’t succeed in one way, they try another. We could probably learn a great deal from damaged geraniums.
 


This is a picture of my hospital bed the first morning I was there. The pattern in the lower right is actually my hospital gown pulled over my knees. I believed at this point that they would run some fluid through my IV and then send me home that afternoon. I would be there, as it turned out, for two more weeks, and my condition would grow worse and worse. So at this point small compositions like this were very interesting, as were the people working there. The housekeeping crew is always a good source of information on the outside world. The ladies with brooms and cleaning carts were the friendliest of all. They should get extra pay for cheering up patients. They know nothing about medicine, but everything about mothering. Sometimes the conversations were in Spanish, which was fine with me. I speak just enough Spanish to understand about half of what they’re saying. The rest I make up with smiles and nods. Even the fixit man stopped to explain the pipes he was fixing. I was an audience, and enjoyed every moment of it.

During this time I experienced two nurses that I blogged briefly about. I wrote those blogs in the hospital on an iPad, so they’re probably not what they might have been had I written them at home. They should appear in the next few days. But as my condition worsened I found myself looking forward more to breakfast than conversation. I slowly became not myself. So, while I had many wonderful nurses, and only one who really irked me, I noticed them less and less. I ended up in two different wards and six different rooms. I had two surgeries and three sessions of dialysis. I am led to believe that fifty years ago, which in my memory is not a great length of time, I would simply be dead. The technology did not exist to maintain me in this condition. But we should also be aware that fewer people could be found in my condition. We are poisoning ourselves at an alarming rate.

I’ve gone through periods of delusion after dialysis, not immediately after, but during the night. I find that my inner delusional brain is much more interesting than my outer one, the one I am using to write this. I’m tempted to write the delusions down, but they seem to change each time I remember them, as if their content depends on what I’m doing as I remember. The knowledge that the brain can go in so many directions all at once, I think, is what drove so many in the 60s to experiment with drugs. They would probably enjoy my post-dialysis delusions. But I’m told I will get used to the disturbance of my blood and the delusions will stop, and I find myself wondering if they really know this to be true or if they’re just trying to keep me calm.

One of my roommates was homeless and not anxious to get well. He turned down treatments and tests until the doctor threatened to throw him out. “Hospital beds are for making people well,” she said. Another was a dynamo who had a stroke between here and Las Vegas and was having enormous difficulty with the fact that the stroke had slowed him down. Yet another had come out of hip surgery and yelled all night for his wife and son whom he believed were just down the hall but couldn’t find him. There is an enormous quantity of sadness in hospitals mixed precariously with thankfulness and gratitude. How the nurses go to work and come home with positive attitudes totally amazes me. Thankfully, they took care of me when I was bright and conversational, and also when I was grim and in pain. One put her arm in mine and walked me downstairs to the door, rather than calling for a wheelchair and an attendant. I felt entirely undeserving, and know that she went back upstairs to do the same for others who didn’t give her a single thought. They don’t do this for the money. They are a rare breed, something humanity could learn a great deal from.
 


A picture of the electrician’s sign over the doorway turning blue. It fades in and out of various colors. I talked about the pond beneath this sign in Double, Double Toil and Trouble in early January. This may be a terrible photograph — I’m not sure what would be necessary for a good one — but it gives an indication that this is not the pedestrian head quarters of an electrical business. It’s something with spunk and class. The trickle of water and the glow of color in a rising or perhaps setting sun. It’s good to know that such people exist.
 


The day after the new year began I posted something called Airbrushed or Watercolored, a single flower that was pristine white with a center almost artificially colored. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. I found it in the collection of things photographed that day on the desktop computer. It was part of a hedge growing up and over a tall fence onto the sidewalk. The day I took the picture it was by itself, but with buds behind it. Well, I passed that fence again today and can tell you that there are now ten thousand flowers just like it seemingly everywhere. I’m not sure if it’s more or less amazing when multiplied. It’s hard to see just one when there are clusters of them, many clusters, running down the fence. It’s like seeing a beautiful girl, and then seeing six or seven of her. It’s right, but also wrong. Something leads us to believe that beautiful things come in small boxes and in limited editions. But when there is too much beauty in one place we begin to ask questions and wonder.
 


I probably know the names of five or six flowers, at least the common names, and would not be the least bit surprised to discover that two or more of those were incorrect. These are obviously not daisies. But they are certainly daisy like. They appear to be succulent flowers, unless they just pushed up through a bed of thick succulent leaves. In a bed of uninteresting green, they are absolutely stunning. And, as is so often the case, these are not only in a patch of uninteresting green, but in an area of little or no interest. Flowers see the world differently than we do, not that we see the world much at all as we pass mindlessly through it. They accept where they are and do their best. Flowers are wonderful symbols of self-sufficiency. They bloom where they find themselves. They do, as they do here, a magnificent job, and then they’re gone. Or rather, they move on to the next cycle, replaced by equals. We could learn a great deal from flowers if we tried.
 


In the middle of last month I posted something called Tiny Flower in a Neglected Hedge. It’s a picture I’ve had waiting to be posted for a while. The flower in the post is about the size of my thumbnail. But on the day it posted I noticed something on the way home. Another flower that was as larger as my fist was growing perhaps a foot from the original one. I was coming down with something that I don’t think you can catch over the Internet. In fact, I became very sick and ended up in the hospital for two weeks. But the flower stopped and confused me. It seemed to be a giant flower of similar color, the first of a cluster to bloom. The original had notched leaves which, if you look carefully, you can see just out of focus in this photograph. Apparently there are two different hedge plants growing in the same space, over the same fence. After remembering the minuscule nature of the first, this one seems like Godzilla, though in the photograph it probably looks a lot like all the others. So I give you everything except the confusion and the amazement, asking that you try to imagine it.

Today on the way to dialysis, after mourning the loss of The Yoga Center once again, I saw that someone had been out with a hedge trimmer and, in complete disregard for these beautiful blooms, hacked and whacked everything back to exposed stems and branches. Good job. There should be something in the CC&Rs to prevent this from happening. No more flowers on this corner for another year.
 

I read today that the number of flowers worldwide has been reduced from about 1,000,000 to 400,000. They did this to eliminated duplicates. I didn’t pursue the article, so I don’t know if the same flower in different colors would be treated as a duplicate. And I don’t know what their system was for putting together the 400,000, but I must say that 400,000 next to 1,000,000 seems rather small. Then I considered how many days there are in a year, and how long it would take to write a quick post about each flower, and the answer struck me quite differently. It would take almost 1,100 years. Eleven centuries. A millennium plus one hundred at the rate of one per day. So, if I started today, ignoring the posts I’ve already done, I would be finished, good health and long life provided, in the year 3,118. But by then, the number would certainly have changed. Could flowers improve in that time, or could we destroy them? The lessons of walking to the market and back every day have been both bewildering and frightening. Are we indeed superior or more important than these natural blooms? Have we no responsibility toward them? Is there nothing we can do to insure their future? Yes, I get kind of mushy when I talk like this, but numbers can lead us astray. The world is infinitely more diverse than we believe. I feel like I could post every day for the rest of my life and not even begin to capture the diversity of my short daily walk.
 


I wrote something about this flower in “By the Post Office” just over a month ago. At least I thought I did. I seem to have bumped it into July because I had something important to say. I now have no idea what that was. These two I found on a wire trellis above head height with a great many more in a wide area along the ground. It was late afternoon and they burned like the setting sun, if only this were science fiction and we had twin suns. It was amazing how elegantly they shared space, what friendliness and camaraderie they showed. In fact, I stared at them for the longest time before snapping this photograph. I had to reach my hands up and hope I got them in the center of the screen. What a delightful pair. I looked, and looked, and finally walked on.
 

A tragedy today from the walking and taking pictures of flowers standpoint. I saw something wrong as I crossed the street this morning. The Yoga Center is no loner there. Not only are they gone, but someone has dug up most of the plants and barricaded the patio, leaving random tatters here and there containing no mystery whatsoever. The Yoga Center was the beginning and end of every walk. I felt somehow empty when I saw dirt in the planters instead of overlapping miracles. The owner is going to redo the building, or so it appears, and leave it drab and perfect. A sort of dressed for business appearance, which I like in starkly modern settings where flowers are an afterthought, but otherwise detest. Maybe it will turn into a real estate office or another hair salon. Such things are necessary, but are they preferable to this mildly chaotic spectacle of plants and objects that I passed every day? I vote for The Yoga Center, for being in tune with the universe, not merely the town and business. And I hope they do well wherever they end up, and that whoever planted the flowers in the first place is alive and rubbing dirt stained hands together.
 


I’ve stopped at this yard a number of times. Last week I posted Bonzai with a picture that was actually taken in early December. I also posted something about Christmas decorations when this magnificent shrub bloomed in an unexpected way. That was Floating Through the Air. And also, when the sidewalks went through, something about the mess left behind in New Year. But all that time there was another, invisible shrub that was simply green and forgettable. I passed it as many times as I passed everything else, and saw nothing. But one bright afternoon when it bloomed, I could see nothing else. It’s smaller, but almost as tall as the main shrub. In the Bonzai photograph one of the trunks to the left belongs to this plant. It seems enormous with he clouds behind, hovering over a corner of the yard. It would be difficult to be brighter than it is. It’s almost as if the sky was made to compliment it.
 


This innocent flower has danger written all over it. The closer one looks, the more careful one becomes. It’s what I call a nursery plant, one that was purchased at a nursery in a six pack, possibly because it had a nice picture on the tag, planted because the space was empty, and kept until it was too big or died, and then replaced. I doubt that anyone suspected it would turn out this way. Of course the nursery knew, or the nursery supplier knew. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, so they sell the greatest possible variety. It is certainly stunning to look at, though I would not be at all surprised to find out that it’s poisonous. Perhaps, or let us hope that insects get an entirely different message.
 


I suppose this is a weed among succulents. It certainly caught my eye. Like so many other things, this took place at the Yoga Center not far from where I live. I always walk slowly to see what’s happening. Today it was a single flower in an ocean of peculiar succulents. I try to read this garden like a cosmic message. The spiritual content seems unusually great. Ordinarily, something out of the ordinary takes place. Today it was this.
 


If there were awards in the flower world for doing things right, this would be an obvious nominee. This flower is the size of a very large fist. It doesn’t just bloom, it dominates. But it does have an eery sense of maybe feeding on small animals. Its beauty is not to be taken for granted. It’s not a flower that happens by the thousands, like daisies, or the minuscule blue flowers on mountain sage. It happens here and there with a sense of authority. I often reach out and touch the petals of of flowers, whether to greet them or to gage their thickness. But I have never reached out and touched one of these. It seems like it wants me to look and leave.
 


Living on the Central Coast not far from the beach means sudden, unexpected fog. Oddly enough, we have more fog in the summer than in the winter. Since I walk uphill to the market every day, or almost every day, I sometimes walk from dense fog into stars or sunlight. The temperature can vary fifteen or twenty degrees. I’m not the only one who carries a sweatshirt in my backpack. And, of course, it’s possible to walk from sunlight or stars into fog on the way home.


This was a fog so thick you could see veins of it moving in the light. Clouds within clouds. Chill within chill. Headlights of cars were visible like pinholes of light from blocks away, but dissolved into fields of glare as they approached. And silence. There is an eerie silence that comes with thick fogs. And also a sudden movement of wind where the fog disappears entirely. Fog is an odd sensation here. Especially at night.
 


The wild reproductive phases of an ordinary plant. All of them seemingly visible at the same time: buds, blooms, shards, and shells. It amazes me the veritable tenacity. Like humans thinking about nothing but sex morning, noon and night. You can’t keep it up forever, but try telling that to those engrossed in it. Tell it to the billboards and magazine covers. Tell the hospital delivery rooms. Just look at the ordinary leaves and tell me you would expect this. Life must go on.
 


The latest cleaning of the church yard has revealed things formerly buried under brush and hidden by low hanging boughs. This spectacle caught my eye the day after the gardeners left. It is too fully formed to have appeared over night. You can see fragments in the background of plants that enshrouded it. You can also see the color of this flower, if that’s what it is, from a block away. Long before you notice that the space has been cleared, or somewhat cleared, you see this announcement. It says, alive and doing well.