Bouquet Of Peace: Join My 365-Day Peaceful Photo Challenge
DAY 151. Curating peace through photos, with and without words.
January 30, 2025
Regardless of age, we all share the everyday human struggles of illness, injury, loss, disappointment, and grief.
All of us, regardless of age, must find and shape a context for our experience.
The greater the difficulty or loss, the greater the struggle to find that context, to move to a state of acceptance, and to curate a sense of mental and emotional well-being over time.
Our lives are our own, but they are also not ours, as we are all subject to fate's strings.
For my sons and others who face life-threatening illness, daily loss and grief run through the threads of every breath they are privileged to take.
The fact is that loss and grief are realities for all of us chanced to have the gift of life but for those experiencing the ever-facing complexities and intensities of diagnosis that can easily portend death, suffering reverberates.
This bouquet of dried leaves, pods, and a golf ball was stunningly beautiful in its simplicity and form on an otherwise empty park bench in a desolate park area.
I paused, took three photos, chose this one to keep, and surveyed the area. Then, I saw a homeless person bundled up and sleeping on the bench on the opposite side of the clearing.
Had he made this bouquet? Had someone else left it there?
Regardless of the answers, I saw the man's physical aloneness. Out in the elements on a 30-degree morning, he was doing what we all need to do—sleeping.
As the bouquet lay alone in her simplicity and beauty, so too did my fellow human being, simple and beautiful in his humanity, without all that we take for granted each day and alone.
My heart welled up with compassion for this man, for everyone I know struggling with irrevocable differences of injury, illness, and loss, and for so many across our earth who know daily the pervasive sense of immeasurable loss.
Driven to act in my small corner of the universe, I decided to step beyond my comfort level to help others who, because of diagnosis or relationship with those who suffer daily, need support, love, and some act of kindness.
I may not know what I am doing, but I can extend a hand and bring others a bouquet of peace.
How does this photo and reflection resonate with your life's journey and desire to be an instrument of peace to others?