189/365 One Flower

"Crepe Myrtle"

I probably shouldn't say this, but I am getting tired of taking and looking at pictures of flowers.  Don't get my wrong, I think flowers are beautiful, but there comes a point where I just want to enjoy the real thing rather than photograph them.  The only reason that I attempted today's prompt rather than going off on my own tangent was that it encouraged us to photograph a single flower from a different or unique perspective.   Perhaps this is because we are all getting tired of taking pictures of flowers and need something to maintain the interest.

We don't have any annual flowers planted.  I had good intentions, but I just never got there.  I don't know where my time has gone, but it definitely has not been spent gardening!  The only flowering anything that we have in the yard right now is the crepe myrtle out front.  It became the subject.

Though it was miserably hot and the air seemed perfectly still when we were out running errands this afternoon, by the time I decided to work on today's photo, there was just enough breeze to make shooting up at the branches a challenge with regard to focus.

I do like the above photo.  Most often it is the bright pink petals of the crepe myrtle that draws my attention.  The yellow in the middle is a nice contrast to all of the pink.  In the photo below, though it includes a whole flower, I was also drawn to the yellow in this one.  To me, it looks like the outline of a heart.  (I also see animals and people in rocks and clouds.)

"More Crepe Myrtle"

This morning at school, one of my students was lamenting her upcoming twenty second birthday, mourning over the fact that she is getting "so old."  Another older student (one who is older than I am) and I gave her the encouraging news that despite what the media and the cosmetics industry tell us, aging is not so bad.  In fact, life gets better, at least it has for me so far.  Yes, there are aches and pains, I don't move as fast and you do start to experience more losses, but those things are going to happen whether you embrace the aging process or not.  Growing older is well worth the trade off for being back at the stage where I was trying to figure out who I am, what I want and how I am going to get and become those things.  

Of all the things that I have learned in my fifty-plus years, the most important is that beauty resides on the inside and not the outside and that it cannot be contained in any one definition.

"Heather and Hume"