As I sit here to write something about this visually inspiring motif, the thing I feel like writing is what I believe is becoming the continuous core of my message that can not be stated enough times... and that is to point out the cyclical nature of existence.
We see the flower, we admire and love the flower, we appreciate the beauty, and then we try to find a way to hold on to only the beauty, and ignore the fact that this flower has grown out of soil, from the nutrients from decaying plants and animals and bugs and other things from last year.
It gets its energy from the sun, a massive, destructive, burning ball in the sky, and it uses carbon dioxide, the waste we exhale, in photosynthesis.
As long as we do not accept both the "light" and "the shadow" we will keep "kicking the can" of our problems and create larger and larger disasters. It's like we're trying to hold our breath, believing exhaling is bad because carbon dioxide is "bad" and we don't want it to go through our mouth.
When we try to avoid death, we actually exterminate the basis for new life.
For humanity to get through the accumulation of crisis's we're currently in, and facing, we need to collectively "integrate our shadow". We need to learn to embrace, process, and deal with everything existence has to offer and stop living in avoidance. We have to open our hearts to grief so it can crack open enough for true love, love as a force of creation, can come through.
It's taken me years of working with visible mending to understand what drew me to it, and it is really all about this. About the surrender to continuous cycles of decay and creation, and learning to love to work with it, patiently, instead of trying to prevent it, avoid it or be ashamed of it.
This perspective and practice is also a great source of hope. Because you see something breaking, dying, changing, not as a threat, but as a hope for new life, as long as you give it time, and as long as you make sure there is fertile ground, and let the sunlight shine through, no matter how dark and hopeless it may feel.