ABSTRACT
Bright tongues of purple and yellow stand firm and tall in their green jackets. Each petal arches out from the centre. Bold, beautiful irises. The buds are heavy, each so full of fragrant petals that they are drooping under the weight of their ampleness. Flowers are not merely objects for our consumption or testimony to our notion of beauty. They are also lives to be witnessed, admired, appreciated, just as they are. In all spiritual traditions, spirit or divinity is said to be immanent as well as transcendent. Indeed it is the immanence and transcendence of the sacred that makes the divine omnipresent. For birth and death, creation and destruction are not opposites, but inevitably co-implicated and contemporaneous processes. Life, death, bloom and fade are intimately coupled. It is only by means of a conceptual violence that their separation is effected.
