Nature Prompt Third Week of December

Leaves that steal – do not steal and plunder from nature

Do Leaves Steal Your Heart?

As a child, I was lucky enough to walk underneath cherry blossoms every April, which was also the month of my birthday. I took the blossom as a gift, and at the time, I noticed that the leaves of those trees were obscured by the beautiful flowers that bloomed at that time of the year only.

Then in the autumn, I enjoyed the beautiful crimson leaves that were scattered all over the pavement on my walk home from school from the same trees. I suppose I enjoyed this walk for around three hundred days for six years and I am gifted to have enjoyed such a walk for so long. Those trees always looked their best.

Beauty

The reflection and prompt organized by Dr. Preeti Singh is one that made me think about personification. Sometimes we don’t look our best. Leaves, however, always look good. Except when experiencing droughts. I photographed some distressed trees and wrote about them when I first joined Medium. Trees have always found a place in my heart. They were a constant companion as I grew up. They obviously gained all the nutrients they needed and ignored me as I jumped to catch a few stolen blossoms from that rich canopy of soft, pink.

And so it is with people. When people are undernourished, they don’t look good. It is easy to present beauty to the world and stay slim when you can afford to buy whatever you want.

Lemon Trees have Scented Leaves

These lemon trees grown from the seed of lemons dipped in honey by the author, have taken 4 years to grow to this height of around 12 inches. They needed indirect sunlight and should be in temperatures of 25 degrees, but have survived 16 to 19 degrees over the past two weeks.

Since I have experienced, Rags to riches, riches to rags, rags to riches, and riches to where I am now, I know what it is like to have not enough money to eat so that your skin is healthy. It may be easy to love that which is beautiful, as Dr. Preeti points out. But, I wonder, might this be selfish? What does the beautiful gain from vacuous adoration? Here below is an amazing photograph I took this summer past of trees holding onto their leaves in summer. Will our grandchildren live to see such beauty?

No? Yes? Maybe? Are you optimistic?

The beautiful needs nurturing. The beautiful need food and warmth and kindness. Without these things, the beautiful will whither and die.

Please do not steal beauty with your gaze

Beauty is transient and must not be taken for granted and cast aside for something shiny and bright and fake. The beautiful is a living, breathing, life force. Real beauty is love and kindness personified. Real beauty is seeing potential in seed and planting it. Then the work begins. A photograph of a fake plant is not the same as the real thing, which takes years to grow and nurture and work to thrive.

The idea that beauty is fixed is only an illusion.

Hard to choose my favourite from the stories that I read this afternoon, so I am selecting four for you today.

Today, I enjoyed reading about a third-person experience of a sunset, and Shubha Apte ‘Soaking up a Stunning Sunset’ close to the Arabian Sea on a stolen moment with a Great Egret after a long day in the office.

Joyce Nielsen as the human touch was very real and visible in this story.

Cristina Cattai has educated me about the banyan tree which is considered sacred in India. I would enjoy seeing some ancient banyan tree photographs.

And one more ‘Kalanchoe — Mother of Thousands Meet our new first-time mother home’, although I found it difficult to find on my laptop, it was there on my iphone. What a mystery….by Debika Kumari — a plant I had not heard of called ‘Mother of Thousands’ and difficult for this writer to cope with all those babies…

Hermione. X