“Beauty helps. I happen to believe the most beautiful things in this life serve no particular purpose. They just are. The reason I use something as fickle as a flower to tell deeper stories in metaphorical ways relates to their characteristic of being fleeting and without agenda.

We see something pretty and assume it came about easily, being blind to the resilience something truly beautiful emerges from.
I’ve spend a very long time thinking about why it is that something so insignificant as flowers has always been such a significant symbol not only through my personal hardships but also a recurring ornament in our hardships as a human race. Swords for battle, gravestones and memories engraved with florals, flags and painted murals calling for peace and restoration in the figurative language of a flower. How very absurd.

Why is it that picking sunflowers every summer in my hometown fields has cured some of my deepest pain, and hiking past burned proteas in my motherland has brought me back to life. I’m currently at the conclusion that beauty simply helps. That we humans in our natural complexities subscribe meaning and interpretation to something that just is for the sake of being, to help us navigate our existence. So perhaps in impossible situations, while our world is burning from many places at once, beauty can help. Not in a “oh this girl is waving a flower in your face and all will be well” kind of way, but as a sincere invitation to let a simple moment experiencing beauty without purpose inspire new ways of navigating our existence.”