Meditation on a Fallen Magnolia Bloom

“Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

Georgia O’Keeffe

The ground beneath the showy Saucer Magnolia tree is strewn with goblet-shaped blossoms.

I cradle one in my hand and bring it to my nose, breathe in its wilting floral fragrance before gently positioning it on a nearby rock for an impromptu photo shoot.

The soft, satiny petals on hard granite evoke the feeling of a shrine; a grotto of pink undulating folds to shelter and protect carpels, which rise up like a green flame from glowing embers of stamens. Every detail of form and color is delicate and fragile.

Steel magnolias?

Botanically speaking, this species is one that endures. So too does this spent bloom, although I see a tiny tear, a lovely imperfection in its contour … like a spirit line woven into a Navajo rug.

The painter Georgia O’Keefe comes to mind, her sensuous blossoms opening, larger-than-life, onto giant canvases. And the poet Tony Hoagland, his musings on a dogwood flowering wildly and Nature squandering her own art recklessly: making beauty / and throwing it away / and making more.

O’Keefe painted mighty magnified flowers so that people would be surprised into taking time to look.

Which is what I’m doing now. And at least for a moment, the elegant intricacies of creation manifested in this one small bloom have been spent, but not wasted.