Flower Power

0 CommentsMonday • August 9, 2010 • by Beverly Britton

: Image via Wikipedia

Life can be so…noisy. A few days ago I read that now we process 3 times as much information than the average person did in the 1950′s. My significant other even speculated it must be higher than that. Beginning with the hated alarm clock every morning, moving in to the radio on the commute to work, inundation with conference calls, computer screens, televisions and smart phones…it’s a heavy downpour of incoming bits, bytes, sounds, images, videos and attachments. And we LOVE it. How wonderful it is to be so connected. How many times have you sat back and wondered in sheer amazement how you would EVER get your job (or life) done without modern technology? We’re evolving to live under the pressure of noise, and furthermore we see it as life-sustaining as our own heartbeat.

But there’s a lot of power in quiet. In silence. It’s why every yoga class ends in savasana and we’re taught that this is the most important pose of all. It’s why we’re drawn to beach vacations, meditation, hiking in the mountains…benefiting from all the gifts we receive when we reduce the noise in our lives and quiet the mind.

To demonstrate this phenomena of balancing extremities, or the multi-tasking mindset vs. the stark simplicity of minimalism, I trace my photographic steps backward.

When I first took this photo, I casually wandered out to my front yard and snapped this shot of yellow flowers bouncing happily in the breeze. They were bright, full, and brimming with the sun’s energy. They looked like tiny little sunshines on flexible green legs. However as I loaded the photo into my computer I saw something very average, un-special and actually quite “noisy”. Frankly, it seemed so one-dimensional and forgettable.

As I cropped, desaturated, and rotated my way through the photo, the striking center of this one flower emerged. The detail in its heart, the outstretched petals absorbing the light. It reminded me of an exploding firework, and I thought, there’s alot of of power here, diving in to the center of this single flower bustling around amongst its brothers and sisters. How much better it seemed when I cut out all the noise and simply focused.

That’s the message in my Flower Power art print on canvas. Reminding us to pause. To give up the rush of boundless streaming inputs. To unhook ourselves from the matrix and discover the rejuvenating blend of life without the stimulation, of silence…and remembering to breathe.