Water Irises. Expression.

The irises that line the sides and compete with the bullrushes at the shallow end of our big irrigation pond are leaning sideways into the steadily dropping water level. It has been so dry this season that we have drawn down the pond to keep the vegetable garden damp during this fragile stage of the small plants` development. In all their fresh flowering glory, down they lie amidst the reflections of sky and overhanging trees. Sad too, with all the associations there are with feelings of transience.

What is positive though, is that I can make the leap from this piece of nature outside of myself and feel it in my own emotions and thoughts. Connections are important, and those irises have shared their message with me more poignantly than if they had stayed upright and faded in the usual course of time.

It is a little backwards I know, to think this way, because we are taught that such an association of feeling to nature is a transfer of our own human moods to things outside ourselves: - I see the fallen flowers and project my own sad thoughts onto them. This is such an ingrained way of understanding the world that it takes a major shake of the head to imagine the opposite; that the irises and I are sharing a passing mood of nature. We express the whole thing and the whole thing expresses us. The reflections, the water, the fallen flowers and I are twining our lives together.

We ‘walk in beauty’ as the Navajo poem says, but more accurately perhaps we walk inside of beauty: we are all singing the same song and the song is singing us.


‘ The entire earth is the true human body.’ Dogen. - a 13th century Buddhist.