See the flower. Take it in your hands. Feel the contours of its petals. The folds within its bud. The heat of the orange pigment that begins to bleed across your pores. The flower erupts in colour, spreading up and over the spaces between your fingers, licking at the air above.
The night above the valley is enriched in stars. A swirling net of gems caught in a cosmic soup. It’s glistening rays ripple along the dusty mesas like light under a shallow, coral sea.
You drop the flower into the bed of its kin. Then, spreading from it, the flowers begin to ignite and the blaze of colour spreads along the central vein of the valley. Pinks, yellows, oranges, and whites. In moments, all is consumed in a spectral inferno. The layered sides of the mesas are exposed by this upsurge of light and colour and the eons poured into their creation are revealed.
You stand in the midst of brilliance. From here, you see the contrast of deepening shadows and know that there is a greater darkness yet to be revealed.
Paddy Dobson
30th August 2020