![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/IMG_8522.jpg\" "\\"Bountiful")
<\/a>Blossoms framing blossoms<\/p><\/div>\n
It’s hard\u00a0to find worthy words for the scene without being trite.\u00a0 The blossoms are wonderful.\u00a0 The blossoms are beautiful.\u00a0 The blossoms are lavish and lush and spectacular.\u00a0 They are even, to finally use an over-worked word appropriately, amazing.\u00a0 What’s so wondrous is the sheer volume of blossoms.\u00a0 It’s like clouds of whitish pink have settled on thousands of cherry trees ringing the Tidal Basin and beyond.\u00a0 Perhaps a cosmic spatula smeared thick, white icing on branched cakes.\u00a0 Or maybe, some great seamstress wound yards upon yards of fluffy, cottony cloth,\u00a0bolts and bolts of it\u00a0on scores of outstretched limbs.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Lavishly slathered billows of blooms<\/p><\/div>\n
Standing in the midst of such grandeur, you want to keep the sight, to hold on to the blossoms, to make this moment and this scene and this feeling last longer.\u00a0 I think the Camera Per Capita Per Square Foot (CPCPSF) rate is one of the highest in the nation, and possibly the world, during the Cherry Blossom Festival.\u00a0 It seems like everyone is carrying at least one camera, snapping this and clicking that.\u00a0 The likelihood of ending up in some stranger’s set of pictures from the cherry blossoms is pretty high around here.\u00a0 Everywhere you look, another mind-bogglingly beautiful scene waits to be imprinted on film or on a chip, mega, giga, and probably terabytes of blossoms.<\/p>\n
<\/a>...framed by a horticultural wonder.<\/p><\/div>\n
I especially enjoyed watching a painter, her canvas propped on an easel, palette arranged with globs: white, pink, mauve and more, of paints she abracadabraed into cherry blossoms on canvas.\u00a0 More interesting than the painter were all the people watching and photographing her.\u00a0 I took a picture just so I could write this sentence: I photographed people photographing a person painting. <\/em> I’m thinking I even saw, hoping actually, a kindred shutterbug actually photographing the photographers.\u00a0 If so, I can write: I photographed a person photographing people, photographing a painter.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n ...photographing painting a picture.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/em>How like me, how like most people, to want to do whatever it takes to try to hold on to all of this.\u00a0 Without thinking, (of course not thinking, who’s thinking when there’s so much feeling to be done, reveling in the lavish glory of these blossoms?), we all are snapping away, clicking our cameras, wanting so much to keep it for awhile, maybe forever.\u00a0 I don’t blame me or us, but it ain’t gonna work.\u00a0 The blossoms are a gift from the trees, from nature, from God, to enjoy for a while before they, like most beautiful things, go away.<\/p>\n Supplicants in the sanctuary<\/p><\/div>\n Scores of people walk along the tidal basin’s edge, yet everyone is quiet, speaking in whispers and respectful voices, mostly, as if we stood in some holy place, a cathedral or temple or something.\u00a0 Actually this place is holy in the sense of meaning unique and set apart for special reverence.\u00a0 Within sight and sound of the city, but separate from it, here is a momentary haven and reprieve from bad news and worry and hate.\u00a0 You can’t blame us for wanting to hold on to that, photograph it to distraction, yet how much more of a reprieve would we get if we just put the camera away for a spell and simply looked at the blossoms?<\/p>\n A Monumental Display<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" March 29 I walked to the Tidal Basin during my lunch hour.\u00a0 The height of blossoms starts today and continues for the next three or so, yet the weather gurus predict rain and even (horrors!) a wintry mix.\u00a0 The blossoms … Continue reading <\/a><\/em><\/em><\/a><\/a>