ORANGES & MORE

On my solitary walks around my city neighborhood I keep my eyes open for beauty. Yesterday, I decided to photograph some of the beauty that surrounds me. Today and for the rest of the week I will share some of these captured visions. Granted, they do say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I do hope that you see what I see.

One of the most striking things I run into on my walks are citrus trees. I absolutely immediately get captured by the dark green leaves and the bright orange spheres that pop from the leafy background.

On a lonely block, there is one lonely orange tree. I had come to notice there were always some oranges laying on the street. The resting place from their short fall from limb to pavement. Usually, I just walk by, gazing at the colors on the ground, counting how many have let go of their branch and ventured on to the harshness of the street below them. Then, always looking up at the tree, scanning to see how many are still holding on.

On this day, I could not help myself and had to stop. I could not bare seeing these four lonely spheres spread out on the cracked concrete. This was not to be their bittersweet end. No. Instead, the teacher in me (and the artist in me) picked them up and carefully arranged them together, at a safe social distance (the distance was also to allow car tires to drive over them and not crush them!), all in a row. I had to move them, line them up and hopefully make a passerby smile and think the next time they walked or drove by this lonely block.

These oranges, now placed across a crosswalk, were no longer scattered, they seemed like they were headed in a certain direction. I often feel like these fallen oranges. Scattered at times, but when I sense and find direction, the possibilities of where I am headed are endless. All I have to do is stop, look around me, find the path, and mindfully heads towards it.