Ephemeral

People who like to dry flowers baffle me. I presume we have a different concept of beauty. A hard concept to describe, that. The dictionary defines beautiful as sensorially or intellectually pleasing. I accept this as the common denominator for everything I've found beautiful, but what makes one thing more sensorially pleasing than the other? What are the other elements that explain such a wide range? Those elements vary from one person to the other, and they are the reason behind the saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

It was in art history class that I first learned about Land Art, also known as Earthwork. Although this form of art is probably the most ancient of all, the term itself originates from the 60's and 70's when such a movement became most prominent in the United States, through the work of artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Land Art consists of using natural materials like soil, rocks and sticks to create works that are exposed outdoors and usually left to be altered by nature. It is changing, living art that often has a very short lifespan. The concept behind Land Art resonated deeply with me. I knew I had found what was, to me, the essence of beauty.

What makes a flower beautiful in my eyes, beyond its aesthetically pleasing appearance and sweet fragrance, is its vulnerability, its ephemerality. Drying a flower so that we may enjoy looking at it longer than was intended is cheapening its beauty and cheating nature. I feel the same way about human life. All its beauty comes from its fragility and brevity. We owe all our passion, all our intensity to our frailty, our mortality. I could want nothing more for my life than to be a supernova among this human skyscape. I want to shine brightly, briefly, and then be gone.