Flowers, footsteps and other impermanent things

"But what does that mean--'ephemeral'?" repeated the little prince, who never in his life had let go of a question, once he had asked it. "It means, 'which is in danger of speedy disappearance" 

- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

It's guess it's not unusual to have a favourite word. It's probably not unsual to even have a few.

Ephemeral is one of those words that since first hearing it, it's taken up a permenant residence in my heart. It's sings of beauty tinged with sadness and joy spiked with melancholia. It reminds that whatever we think we own forever is no more than an illusion borne of our desire to hoarde precious intangible memories into physical material goods one can 'possess'. Through words, we attempt to cast our experiences into resin and collect them on our shelves, as if through retrospective exhaltation we can bring past moment back to life. 

Anais Nin once said "we write to taste life twice" and this is a virtue I lived by throughout my younger years, yet soon I realised that each moment has so unique and complex a taste that no amount of words can ever adequately reconstruct the flavour experienced in the very moment it was first lived. We long for the restoration of the fleeting memories of joy whilst refusing to acknowledge that our words are but ghosts - hollow attempts to cast in resin a choice fragment of reality so that we may claim the un-claimable, to own a piece of the un-ownable, to have succeeded in making the ephemeral, eternal. 

Yet, at best, our words are like footprints in the sand, destined to be blown away by impersonal desert storms as we still scream out from our souls for mercy. In desperate effort, we try again and fail again to forge blowing sand into clay so we can cling on to the form on memories once past, for footprints long ago laid. We long after the marks in the sand, well after the moment has stood up from where we lay and walked itself far into the horizon. 

Ephemeral is one of those words that stand amongst my favourites, for how perfectly it captures the impermenance of life. This word stems from the Greek Ephḗmeros - which can be broken into two components; epi meaning 'on' and hēméra meaning 'day'. It could perhaps more literally be translated as 'on one day' or 'lasting for one day'. This more literal definition summonds to mind a particular flower which holds both the qualities of ephemeral nature and exquisitely unique beauty - the Victoria Amazonica. The Victoria Amazonica is one of the great water lilys of the Amazon rainforest - a category of eceptionally large water lilies found in the Amazon and it's surrounding permaculture - and its spell-bindingly beautiful flowers bloom briefly - no more that just a day or two. The Lily itself is famed for its huge, majestic lily pads, known to grow in a peculiar manner where the structure of the plant is capable of holding the weight of an entire adult human being on the surface of the water. A quick google search will return you with images of small children and lithe young women perched upon them as if they weighed no more than a rainforest amphibian. But for me, it is the flowers of this plant are which captured my imagination - with their brief and unusual spectacles of abundant life perfectly defining the imperfect impermenance and wonder of nature's brilliance. 

The flowers of the Amazon lily begin as a plump, verdant bud, peeking out heavily from the water's crown. As the soft morning light hits the bud, it blooms into a cascasding symphony of delicate, white petals - their regal snowy head floating softly on the waters surface like the gentle pleats of a ballerina's tutu. Regal and pure, it holds it's head confidently atop the water, basking in the earnest heat and glow of the sun - but as the sun sets, the flower begins to change. It twists and curls in on itself - a crooked, sultry dance as it shakes off the regidity and conformity of it's daytime facade. As evening falls, the flower explodes into an awe-inspiring, majestic shade of royal magenta, petals dancing feverishly in the nocturne,desperate for the attention of none as it performs it's greatest glory to the silence of the night sky. These are flowers that reserve their greatest splendor for the darkness, basking in the soft glow of the moonlit night until that same jewel encrusted night sky bids it farewell. With the first caresses of morning sun, the flowers shrivel up in exhaustion, life-force and energy-sapped, they sink peacefully back into the dark murky depths of the water. 

Perhaps some of us were born children of the moon lily - capable of gracefully carrying unreasonable weights upon our shoulder with grace whilst burning brightest and most furiously in the solitary night. In the forebaring of that unimaginable pressure we expending the final sparks of our lives in a glorious show with only the moon and start to bare witness to our truth, to watch the one and final spectacular dance of our lives. And so with the stars as our bretheren and the moon our confidant, we walk forth in joyfully solemn solitude. We walk forth, no longer casting resin footprints of ghosts, but stepping out boldly to create the steps of our own story - our own journey into the welcoming night.

Watch a timelapse of the Victoria Lily here