Because we want them to be so?

“But what makes a flower beautiful?”, my younger one asked.

‘What’, he had said, not ‘why’, and that got me thinking. Everybody agrees that flowers are beautiful but what makes them so? It can’t be the colour- because I think many orange flowers are beautiful, though I can’t stand the colour. The shape of the petals are attractive, but aren’t many petals shaped no different from leaves? It could be the placement of the whorls, but isn’t it the economy of lines that gives an anthurium its unique beauty?

Maybe flowers are beautiful because we want them to be so?

Is beauty absolute?

“Aren’t those flowers beautiful?”, asked the son.

I looked around, but couldn’t find anything that even faintly resembled a flower. “Where? I don’t see any flowers here.”

“Look, there.”

“Where, Sweetheart? There aren’t any flowers here.”

“Are you blind or what”, he said, before taking me by the hand and dragging me to a clump of wild grass. “Now can you see the flowers?”

Yes, when you looked at it through my son’s eyes, the grass was beautiful. More beautiful than most flowers.

Can there be an absolute standard for beauty? Who decides what qualifies as beautiful, and what doesn’t?

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

Beauty that will remain

Distant mountains. Majestic rocks. White lines where there will be waterfalls. Arid vegetation clinging on tenaciously, knowing it will soon be smothered by wildflowers that spring up after the first rain shower.
Heightened senses. The cool breeze lifting up my hair, playing with every strand before putting it down. The smell of parched earth. The sound of water scuttling by.

Surrounded by exquisite beauty, my heart should soar. Why then does an inexplicable sadness overwhelm me? Is it because I know the beauty will remain even when I am gone? Is it because perfection reminds me of my own mortality?

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

A splash of pink

The splash of pink caught the eye. Paint spilled on the lush green carpet. A wildflower blooming by the side of the trail. A month back, it had been a tiny seed waiting for the monsoon showers to breathe life into it. A month later, it would have faded and died, after scattering seeds that will wait for the next monsoon rain.
I knew not the name of the flower. So ephemeral is it's existence that I might never see it again. We shared a moment in time, a point in space. And life will never be the same again.

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

No artist can come close

There it was spread out before me. A glorious carpet in vivid hues of red, flame and green. It drew the eye in, encouraged it to trace curves, then threw it out again. The pattern was deceptive; did it repeat, did it not? You could gaze at it for hours, and not see enough of it. Can anything be more beautiful than the canvases painted by Nature, I wondered.
A gentle breeze hit the stream. Threw a blanket of silver ripples over the water. The carpet disappeared under the cloak of silver. No artist can come close to Mother Nature.

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.