Not the same plant, but the difference between spring and fall. A burst of life and a death that produces seed for the next generation. Each is its own part of the process. One warms our heart while the other saddens us. It leaves us empty because we live with the strange belief that springtime should last forever and that youth should be eternal. The truth is that life itself is eternal, though the living are temporary.

This looks like a kind of onion growing in a neglected yard. We see the roots and stems of onions, if the green part is a stem, but we never see such things as this at the market. Stores offer a very narrow range of plant life. We don’t find onion seeds or onion blooms, though I think there's something called onion salt. In fact, these may have nothing to do with onions, but it’s all I can come up with. Round balls of bloom. Edible or inedible? I think I’ll leave that to someone with more gusto for life and a greater inherent sense of experiment. I’m reminded of a line that Google has not helped with, though I thought it was from Ben Johnson’s dictionary. Maybe I just improved on Swift a bit. “Brave was he who first of oysters ate.” Indeed.

Here is a flower that is too large, too long and too low to the ground. I’ve never seen anything like it — words repeated over and over this year — though it may not be as rare as I think. I found it close to the hospital after Nurse's Clinic at the dialysis center and had to stop and look again. It’s almost as if it expects ants to help pollinate it. Of course there are many more higher up, but they have mostly passed their prime and are shriveling up and dropping everywhere, making an enormous mess. The mess, of course, might be part of how they propagate. I saw a prettier version of this flower on the cover of a book recently: Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. I haven't read the book, but I recognized the flower. It’s hard not to stop and consider such things. It's big and strangely interesting, but in truth I don’t find it beautiful the way I do most flowers, which are fewer and fewer this time of year. It has a certain alien quality. Something to catch the eye, but nothing one wants to ponder. I hope the book does better than the flower.

A single spot of yellow in St. Timothy’s garden, the most blooming place on my walk these days. A four petaled (though it looks like more) bright yellow flower not in the main garden, but outside the wall where cars drive by. It strikes me as interesting because, like a number of succulent flowers, it seems to grow and announce itself until replaced by another, and another. In other words, it has a stem that flowers and reflowers until it just wears out. Beneath it you can see the row of pods forming from past iterations. There would seem to be no end to the ways Nature has devised to facilitate reproduction. Behind it are other flowering plants with reddish orange spikes pushing up through a bed of unkempt leaves and stems. I find myself slowing down, not that I walk that fast, as I approach the church, never knowing quite what to expect. The garden seems like the work of enthusiasts, as opposed to the work of gardeners or landscape architects or designers, though I have seen what looks like gardeners now and then. Someone has an idea to plant something, and it gets planted. Pride radiates outward from every plant, but there remains very little in the way of overview and masterplan. It’s an acquired taste, I suspect, something that Father “Ed” seems to have mastered. It has a distinct churchlike feel. Beauty interspersed with chaos.

I’m rather fond of this picture. I’ve kept it on the desktop for a while. It lacks in composition, but it lacks nothing in density. There isn’t one square inch that isn’t active and growing. It represents for me a kind of perpetual springtime. Of course, there is more to life than activity and growing, and sometimes we just crave open spaces to be left alone in, but before you harden your heart or sour your life, admit just for one moment that this density is inviting, is cosy, is beautiful.

A bit worse for wear, but giving it all they have. You can kill the plant, but you can’t always kill its future. Flowers are deadly serious about the future. Their goal is to produce seed that will reproduce the plant that is no longer there. A world filled with flowers is a stupendous world. A world likely, one way or another, to continue.

I love the red tint along the edges and the variable greens these plants offer. They are only two feet from each other in a garden meticulously maintained. There is so much in such a small space that it’s hard to decide what to look at. On one, red starts immediately, but on the other it comes almost as an afterthought. Somewhere I wrote about chlorophyl being green, but the green is capable of being drowned out by other colors. When I was in high school we were taught that chlorophyl came in various colors, which explained purple and red tinted leaves. But it turns out, according to Google and others, that chlorophyl is green and simply capable of being overcome.

Whatever is going on, the ability of chlorophyl to step back, as it were, and allow other things to visually predominate, adds a beautiful dimension to a number of succulents. Red in these cases outlines and emphasizes, which does not seem accidental. It makes one wonder how many other tricks Nature has up her sleeve.

Dying leaves and pumpkins ready for harvest. They start out as yellow bumps at the ends of flowers and swell slowly into orange masterpieces. It seems too much to ask for. Some are almost two feet across, filled with pumpkin seed and pumpkin flesh, ready for pies, brown sugar sweetened side dishes and Jack-o’-lanterns. Yes, fall is here, and all is well.

The actual equinox was yesterday at 6:54 PM local time. So if you heard people saying that yesterday was the first day of fall, they were only partly correct. But today is the first full day of fall, which means more, I think, than saying that the last 5 hours and 6 minutes of yesterday were fall. It didn't seem right to celebrate, if that's what we do, 17 hours and 54 minutes early. (This post normally goes up automatically at 1:00 AM.) So, I decided to let yesterday be the end of summer, which it was, and today the first day of fall. Though clocks are standard metaphors for time, the universe does not run like round, geared wheels. Nothing travels in an absolute circle, and there are no bells or whistles when the day and the night become for an odd instant equal. Time is a human abstraction. Time composed of units. As Heraclitus said, "You cannot step in the same river twice.” The river is infinitely different from moment to moment. Of course, I could go back and type that differently, but time itself, whatever time turns out to be, moves on with or without the words. So, for what it's worth, happy first day of fall. Now the nights become longer than the days until by the end of a normal day it is already dark and things begin moving forward in reverse. It has nothing to do with calendars. The words of William Blake may sound familiar, but they are seldom understood:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour […]

He was emphasizing thoughts we normally ignore. Hoping we would see what we seldom see. It could very well have been the moment of equinox.

The photograph, as usual, is of the gate at Terry and Cami’s house. If I didn’t have a calendar of my own, I would know the season by its gately decorations. I took this picture at 6:54 last night.

Summer is often a headlong rush into catastrophe. Things reach their potential, but then keep on going. They crowd each other out. They grow, die and decay until all sense of order is undone. A piece of this and a piece of that. Things out of control until the moisture is sucked from them and the next cycle begins. It’s a time when we tend to think of other things. To imagine and to remember. To ready ourselves for what comes next. But not to think too closely about what actually is.

Is there anything more ornately beautiful or less inviting? This is the beauty of pure ruggedness. Not something for the feint of heart or the weak livered. This is perfection mixed with dirt and grit. It beams danger. It threatens to hurt, to injure, to remove. And yet, it does all these with the precision of absolute beauty in a world we cannot grasp, cannot fathom, and yet understand completely.

In a dying corner of the garden, giant sunflowers have decided to bloom. The garden is not dying from neglect, but from the season. The sweat peas that covered an entire wall are gone. It is time to regroup before pushing ahead for another year. I’m not sure if the sunflowers are growing simply because they found an opportunity or because it’s their time, but one sunflower seems the equivalent of a thousand blooms, and we have what seems like a hundred of them. What an unexpected surprise.

Amid fragile leaves, this surreal display. As if they’re planning to hide in the coming snow. Of course, there will be no snow. I have never seen flowers like these. I’ve said that perhaps a hundred time this year. Were my eyes always closed, or are these new? And does it matter? They are strangely beautiful.

An ant and a bee in a flower that is only holding a place while we wait for this year’s sweet peas to arrive. The twine in the background is their trellis. Late summer, early fall seems like a time for large flowers, as if we have grown tired of tiny perfection and they wish to grab our attention. It has certainly succeeded with an ant and a bee at the same time. Perhaps there just isn’t enough for them to do this time of year. Fewer and fewer flowers. Less and less to eat and to pollenate. Does Nature never rest?

I’m told these are hollyhocks. I started this week with what I believed to be a hollyhock. My neighbor planted a number of things from seed and then transplanted them here and there among which was a space under the staircase. They seem rather temporary to me, like they will bloom and then never appear again, and perhaps also a bit unreal. They grow on tall stems and flower madly once they’ve begun. These are almost white with a touch of pink and a surprising yellow center. Wikipedia says, “Alcea is a genus of about 60 species of flowering plants in the mallow family Malvaceae, commonly known as the hollyhocks. They are native to Asia and Europe.” Obviously it says nothing about the staircase, but it also says nothing about how stunningly beautiful they are.

Almost mesmerizing. How could so much find its way into a single flower? I ask the question, but provide no answer. Sometimes I feel very small and very simple confronted by something so large as a single flower.

When my boys were really young we drove down to San Diego one Sunday afternoon to take them to the zoo. But instead of the regular zoo, which they had been to when they were really too young to remember, we drove out to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, now called the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where the animals appeared to roam in the wild. It was the perfect trip for young parents. But the surprise of the day was a sort of annex to the park. What seemed like miles of shade cloth tents housing a world class collection of fuchsias. If it seemed like miles, it seemed like millions of different flowers all being carefully misted to fight off the heat, and each of them meticulously labeled.

The San Diego Zoo has this to say:

Today, there are about 110 species of Fuchsia, which are mainly native to South America, with a few from Mexico and Central America and some from New Zealand and Tahiti. Some are tropical species, while others prefer a cool, mild climate. Some are considered hardy enough to live in cold climates, where they die back during the winter and produce new growth in the spring. The immense popularity of these plants has led to extensive hybridization, resulting in thousands of varieties of cultivated fuchsias.

I have only the slightest memory of the animals, but I remember a bewildering array of beautifully colored fuchsias. More fuchsias than I could see in a single day. Certainly more than could be seen with two active boys and a wife. These memories come back to me each afternoon as I open the door to start my walk. A large display of madly blooming fuchsias hang from the staircase immediately in front of me. My neighbor has put together a collection from various nursery throwaway piles and yard sales, and nursed them into magnificence. They seem to love everything he has done for them. They bloom without restraint. I don’t really deserve this display, but there it is. I feel blessed every time I open the door.

I devote this week to pictures taken only a few feet from my door. Without exception, each flower is the result of my neighbor’s determined effort. I thought he had no idea what he was doing. A few months later it turns out he just had ideas different from mine. This, I believe, is a hollyhock. It’s a large flower and its color is magnificent. If you raised your eye a bit you would see my window. But the hollyhocks don’t care about my window, they care about the sun and insects. They care about reproduction and the ongoing cycle of life. They remind me that life is short, even if life goes on forever.

And here they are together. Not identical, but close enough. You’ll see white and lavender buds about to bloom. First there was white, then a few of each, and finally a plant that’s going to be filled with both. If I walked a little faster I might have missed them. Or if they weren’t quite so beautiful. It’s a tiny plant in an uninteresting garden that is growing ferociously, but with enough interest of its own to make the entire garden a delight. I wonder if these grow on their own as weeds. Such a gift is the tiny camera in my telephone.

The old Yoga Center slowly giving up the glow of its good vibrations, or plants in jail as I find myself thinking of this photograph. The plants are filled to the brim with good vibrations and are not about to give up. The ones not transplanted have stretched out their arms, though behind bars, and have grown with happy abandon. The lesson here is that spiritual success is not the same as material wellbeing. It’s not so much about the freedom to have as the freedom to be. And these plants, and those outside the frame of this photograph are content to be themselves. They are undaunted by the threat of containment. Their territory is the universe itself and all that’s beyond this tiny place.

I’ve passed this plant time and time again this past year and it’s always been in bloom. Such bright, beautiful upraised blooms. But everything else seems to have come and gone, bloomed and died away. So it occurs to me that this may be a perpetually blooming plant. How could I know from just looking at it now and then. I’m sure that such things exist. But, do they? Is it possible it simply has a very long blooming cycle? Or that it’s temperature sensitive and thinks it’s blooming season because the weather here and the temperature are so consistently the same? The ocean tends to moderate all weather change. Fog chills the summer and clear winter afternoons warm things to foggy temperatures. Maybe the plants are, at least this plant is confused or perplexed. It’s never ragingly in bloom, but rather vaguely in bloom. At least that’s my theory. The more I think about it the more I feel that the memory of it being in bloom is all I have. I remember it as being in bloom, whereas the blooms have come and gone and I remember nothing of the plant unless or until it is in bloom. In other words, I’ve come to believe that I remember it as always being in bloom because when it is in bloom it etches itself into my mind and memory and is therefore always in bloom. And then I wonder if that makes sense. Do I remember this plant or not? Because when I look, as I did today, it looks bright and happy and seems like it must be perpetually in bloom.

I decided not to go for a walk today. I didn’t have to and there would be no consequences if I didn’t. I was tired and didn’t want to. Case closed. Five minutes later I was dressed and walking out the door. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to go for a walk, but even prisoners get their moment in the yard every day. Not going for a walk was like being in solitary confinement. It didn’t matter how tired I was. It didn’t matter that I would walk the same walk I do every day. I needed to get out. I needed to be in the presence of other people, no matter how interesting things are in the confines of my home. And I talked to two clerks, one at MacDonalds where I had a hamburger and a cup of coffee, not the best coffee and not the best hamburger, and to a clerk at Albertsons to tell him that the machine gave me nine dimes and two pennies in change, which means it probably needs coins. Nothing spectacular. Nothing that amounted to a conversation. The dog I gave treats to on the way to MacDonalds gave me a single, careful bark to get me on the right side of the street, and I gave her treats twice in the same day. And I realized how much better this was than locking myself up for the day. I felt relaxed and meaningful. I felt the sunshine on my arms and the ocean breeze in my lungs, and before I realized it, I was home again typing a distracted blog post.

This looks to me like a detail from a Japanese painting. It’s actually a plant run wild on the side of the fire station. Before it gets too far someone will pull it down. But for now it’s worth stopping, worth looking at. How lucky I am to walk so slowly.

Not all bushes are meant to be hedges. This one has been cut back until it can’t go forward. Its skeleton sticks through its skin. Brown seeks to predominate. And yet, even in this condition there’s something fascinating about it. It has become a living and a dying texture, not a green well mannered clump, but a patch of life in all its stages. We see the past without quite seeing the future. Just like us. Just like everything around us. No matter what we do, we are not perfect hedges. We advance and retreat, grow and die. And that is the life we live. The intermediate texture of past and future, life and death and, of course, today.

I suppose one could devote an entire blog to nothing but birthdays and anniversaries. There are only 365 days in a year, not counting leap year, so the odds of it being someone’s birthday amounts to one in three hundred sixty-five. Not a spectacular long shot. And saying that someone is 29 years old might be interesting, especially to the person whose birthday it is, but it would also lack gravitas. At least half the population is or has been 29. But saying that two people have been married — to each other — for 29 years takes your breath away. You could go up and down the street mile after mile, and the odds are you would not find a single couple.

I found out on my walk today that Terry and Cami, mentioned on this blog numerous times, are celebrating their 29th wedding anniversary. And not just celebrating it, but celebrating as the same happy couple they were 29 years ago. It boggles the mind and reminds almost all of us how far we have failed in the pursuit of perfection. Happy Anniversary to the happiest couple I know.

This photo may lack something in composition, but it lacks nothings in color, intensity and variety. Even the wood chips add something. I have no idea what any of these plants and flowers are. I don’t remember seeing them before. They seem almost foreign, if not artificial. One wonders what language they speak, or languages. A happy United Nations of plants in a corner all their own. What could be more enticing?

I’m rather fond of this picture. I’ve kept it on the desktop for a while. It lacks in composition, but it lacks nothing in density. There isn’t one square inch that isn’t active and growing. It represents for me a kind of perpetual springtime. Of course, there is more to life than activity and growing, and sometimes we just crave open spaces to be left alone in, but before you harden your heart or sour your life, admit for one moment that this density is inviting, is cosy, is beautiful.

I found this in a folder this morning while looking for something that I still haven't found. I moved it from the desktop to a folder — how long ago? — and then apparently forgot that it existed. It's a bit out of date, but I'm posting it because it made me feel like rewatching both movies mentioned. I would encourage everyone to do the same.

I was disappointed by the reviews and the general response to Arrival. It was, I thought, an absolutely brilliant film. I experienced something similar in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray jumped out of the car to work his way through a crowd and say something to Scarlett Johansson — an important closure. Everyone seemed to hear what he said, but everyone heard something different. What he said, in fact, could not be heard. That was, of course, very important, but it was also beyond the reach of all the viewers I talked to. The ending of Arrival is a collection of past, present and future, and yet no one seemed to be aware of that. When Louise Banks hugs Ian Donnelly in the end, she says, “I forgot how good it was to hold you.” But she hasn’t held him yet. And when he asks if she wants to make a baby, she says yes, and the baby we next see is Hannah in the same blanket as at the beginning of the film. Hannah is somewhat ambiguous as a cowboy. She is also in blue. These little hints are meant to misdirect. Ian is shown out of focus for the most part to complete the notion that he either is or is not the father of Hannah, that we are seeing him in the future or else Hannah’s father in the past. Louise learns to remember calling General Shang. She flips through an empty book and finds the title page — and then is lecturing about it. These are different points in the existence of the book and of our fictional understanding of the Universal Language. To most people this was just stuff that happened at the end. A good many were already on their way back to the car, and home, and television.

This is the part we normally walk past without noticing. Of course, as I’ve written over and over again, most people don’t notice anything at all. But this is a very important part of the cycle. These were geraniums, so thick and lush that they seemed like a huge, solitary bloom. That was their initial phase, the one that attracts us to them. I feel closer to geraniums than any other flower. But this, the going to seed, not my appreciation, is why there were flowers in the first place. It’s not as pretty as we like things to be. These have been partly covered in spider webs and non-geranium leaves are seeking a foothold. What we have here is mass reproduction on a scale incomprehensible when compared to the human. This was a stunning display of geraniums a month ago. Today it is a stunning display of what flowers are all about.

I took this the day after the others. I went back to check on the Matilija poppies and had to step through a ring of bushes to reach it, though it was not necessary to stand very close. It’s an interesting bloom, somewhat ordinary until one realizes that the purple part is about ten inches across. It’s on a dangerous looking plant with pointy leaves and petals on the end of a thick stem unfolding like an artichoke. Perhaps it is an artichoke, or at least a relative. It’s astonishing in some ways, but not what I would call inviting. One wonders if the purple is poisonous. I doubt that it is, but I’m not willing to put much faith in that. What I did was to snap this picture and carefully retreat. It’s an eerie but interesting moment that I find myself reluctant to remember.

These are bright orange and red alstroemeria. I know that because I buy alstroemeria at the market for my desk. These, however, are the brightest most vibrant ones I have ever seen. They are growing by the hundreds in a corner of St. Timothy’s church, almost as if there’s nothing special about them. They are just a few hundred perfect flowers growing in a corner of the garden. It makes me think that churches are meant to save more than souls.

I’m really fond of these flowers. They reach into the sky clinging to the trunk of a tree. Their color I find inviting. They are, of course, only the first. In a few days there will be thousands, each more perfect than the next. They blend well with the blue of the sky and the hint of clouds, and give a freshness to the aging bark and the mass of confused leaves above. Just below them is a wall about five or six feet tall, the southwestern wall of St. Timothy's church. I had to move up close to take this picture. It gives them, I think, a sense of majesty being disconnected to anything below, as if their individual perfection weren’t quite enough.

I have seen things for the first time over and over again this year, but I’ve never, ever, seen anything like this. It is also on the grounds of St. Timothy's. What on earth is going on? It looks like a Disneyesque evil flower. Something the prince must slice his way througth to save the damsel. But this isn't a cartoon. It's in a corner of the church garden. I encourage you to double click the image and ask yourself the same question. What on earth is going on?

Another surprise at St. Timothy’s. A tripartite flower on the edge of the sidewalk. I suppose all flowers on the grounds of Catholic Churches should be trinitarian, though that would severely limit what they plant. This is a gem that seems to have taken a degree in theology. It says, in flower language, “Welcome to St. Timothy’s.”

This is the Matilija poppy I saw blowing in the wind. One of the few flowers I know the name of. I used to call it a fried egg flower, because it has a yellow yolk in the middle of a large round white. I learned the name Matilija from Sunset Magazine about thirty years ago, and somehow it stuck. It looks pretty much like any other flower, but proportion has a lot to do with it. Each petal on this flower is as big as my fist. When that sinks in, it changes everything. You can see them along the road and focus on each flower as you zoom by. There are two patches of them between San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay. If I road a bicycle, which is well beyond my ability these days, I would have photographed them many times already. But there’s nowhere to stop, no way to step down from the bus. They grow in clumps, where you might see a hundred blooms swaying in the wind, and they grow at the ends of very long stems. It’s a magnificent plant with a stupendous bloom.

Thirty years ago when I was learning the name, I also learned that they were impossible to propagate. They were wild, pure and simple. Trying to grow them in your yard was a waste of time. But this poppy wasn’t growing along the road, it was growing in the garden of St. Timothy’s church. There were two or three blooms and what looked like a hundred more on the way.

Wikipedia tells me that the Matilija is a variety of Romneya, named for Irish astronomer John Thomas Romney Robinson. It also tells me, and this is the first time I've heard it from anyone but myself, that it's sometimes called a "fried egg flower" or "fried egg plant”. So, I wasn’t all that clever.

And a quick look at Google tells me that everyone in the world is now propagating, at least planting and growing, Matilija poppies in their own back yard. Apparently, calling them wild, pure and simple was nothing more than a myth. Maybe nurseries didn’t want people growing them. Maybe they received dangerous messages from outer space. Or maybe someone writing an article on Matilija poppies just had to fill a few more inches and made the whole thing up. And I believed it. The plant is unremarkable, but the myth gave its flower weight. It made each of them seem like an oversized miracle. And perhaps they are.

It’s not a great work of art by any means, in fact, it’s rather confused, but it does have lots of heart. I should say at this point that I'm not a catholic, but that St. Timothy's church is on my daily walk and that this is a sign in the garden of St. Timothy’s church. I’ve written a lot about this garden here and there as things bloomed. The sign is hidden enough that I only stumbled on it. You have to push your way through bushes to see it, so it’s a nice surprise. I was trying to get close to the Matilija poppies, more about which tomorrow, just out of sight to the left. I saw one of them unmistakeably from a distance, but the closer I got, the more it seemed not to exist. Suddenly, I saw not only the sign and the poppies, but a homeless person asleep between them. I was embarrassed and had to be careful not to wake him. He squinted for a moment, wondering why I was tiptoeing around. I told him about the “fried egg flowers” but he seemed confused. Fried eggs and flowers. He was much more interested in sleep than flowers or signs or me. He gave a half-smile and slumped back to sleep. I wasn't a threat. St. Timothy’s garden is indeed a place for inspiration and acceptance.