Images, sound, text. They affect me. All of us. Any of us.

It’s why I’ve chosen to be careful about what I look at. What I view could lead to momentous pain. Or incredible nostalgia. Or long flowing sighs of love.

This picture of the flowers. Reminds me of fall. And love. And gentleness. These things don’t come to me in words though. They come in waves of feeling. Like that sense and reminder you get from the breeze holding the scent of the previous season, all seasons lived. The love you kissed in 10th grade. The ocean you heard at 20. The winter walk through the Rocky Mountains at 25.

These flowers hold the cooling glow of fall. They are the birth of another season. They are the loss of summer and new things to be learned. They hold a meaning beyond my words that strokes my heart and reaches to be understood. The only expression they find being a welling up from my heart, a stuckness in my throat.

These flowers are all things captured in a moment. They are me. They are my life. They are all the lives I’ve lived in this one body and the more to come.