“Your flower beds are so lovely, full of color, warmth, free spirit. I see the comfortable blending of the many differences working to produce peace and harmony. I know that is what you are working for in life. You have achieved it in your flower beds. Thank you for this gift you share with us.” – Cynthia Daniello

I’ve never met Cynthia Daniello, yet I feel like we know one another very well, and it feels like I’ve know her for years. She called often on my two recent radio shows – fun but not practical – and I got to know her on the phone and through e-mails.

I trust Cynthia, she has a good heart, and has been through a great deal of difficulty, all of which is handled with enormous grace and forebrearance

Curiously, I feel she knows me better than most of the people who get to see me. Often, when she messages me, I get to learn things about me, things I didn’t realize or grasp.

This is the story of my life really, I am rarely the first to  understand me and the changes in my life. Some my readers know me well enough now and are kind and thoughtful enough to tell me what’s going on in my head. After all, they have a perfect view of it.

I am hyper-sensitivie to the tone I sense in the people who send me messages – sometimes too sensitive. I react sharply to lecturing, pomposity or the suggestion that I am too dumb to know that sheep and donkeys need to feed regularly or the difference between a sewer of fabric and a seasmstres who sells fabrice as clothes. People telling me what I can and should write is yet another trigger, I never react well to that.

These petty problems and arguments are not important. What is is the search for a full and harmonious life. Flowers are helping me keep my eye on the ball.

This is what the flowers represent to me as I am learning just how harmonious and collegial their lives really are.

(The Smoke from Canada Is Gone, at least for a day or two. I can see the Green Mountains again, and the sky. I like being able to breathe easily again.)

I started getting serious about the flower photos when I managed, after many years of scheming and plotting, to get a Leica camera that could keep up and surpass my own ambitions about my photogaphy. I started out with two Leica Q cameras, one color, one black and white.

I ended up trading both of them for a mirrorless Leica SL2-S.

There is no Leica camera or Leica lens that I can afford to buy straight out, but I have learned to barter and scheme to trade up. The new Leica, along with a few rented lens, gave me a tool that would live up to my creative ambitions and more.

But first, and for the first time in my life, I had to go to school and learn a lot more about cameras, lights and color.

Tools like this are transformative, they really got me moving and learning.

Beyond that general feeling, I really had no idea what kind of flower photos I could take or wanted to take.

Cynthia, who travels in a wheel chair, has saved a deaf rescue dog named Edgar and taught him how to talk to her.

She lives alone in a Virginia assisted care facility. She loves animals and she fights for them. She saw right away what I was trying to do with my flower photography well before I did.

They are about peace and harmony, the kind I see through the lens and the kind I wish to see in my heart and soul. This is why this photos are such a big deal to me, and why I work so hard to do well by them.

The flowers do represent what is going on inside of me, I suppose all photography does. My pictures always capture who I am and who I wish to be. I’m touched that Cynthia grasped this before I did, and from a distance.

Lots of people who message me  believe they know me intimately. Cynthia is humble, but she really does.

Thanks, Cynthia. I don’t hear from you often, but when I do, it really matters. You are a very special friend.