We celebrate Birth and Life.
We avert our eyes from Death and Dying.
We see life in Kodachrome.
We see Death in monochrome.
After the recent freeze,
I went into the garden on a mission to study death and dying
in the plant life there.
I made many photographs of what I saw.
I want to share the death of the Staghorn here.
After the frost,
The Staghorn anchor leaves changed from tender green
to silver and gold in the sun.
The Staghorn was but an ephemera on the continuum
from stardust to stardust.
Her death a minuscule marker for those who came
before and those who will come after.
When we banish the Fear Lizard
and view death through our spirit lens,
we see the nuance of color in death as in life.
This image is as I saw it.
In death, too,
There is noise. There is darkness. There is light.
There is color.
In the end, when the leaves are shrunken, gnarled, twisted and dried
their essence is visible in their structure.
As I observed them through the lens
I was surprised and astounded by the transformation.
When they were green and broad and healthy,
the veins in their leaves were visible against the sun.
But they were only green leaves with a faint silver cover.
As I watched them die,
I understood the complex transience of life
And the incredible beauty of death.
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind
and to melt into the sun?
~Khalil Gibran
Note: Re-posted from January, 2014 (A favorite post that I wanted to share again.)