Some Sort of a Metaphor

So what’s the metaphor here? Or more accurately, how many metaphors can you list? We have birth and death, youth and age or youth and experience, beauty and the beast, spring and winter, fresh and faded, new beginnings and endings, living well and living hard, all seen as both in contrast to each other and as a spectrum on which both exist equally.

I was immediately attracted to this isolated rosebud on a large rose bush from across a street and didn’t see the dead branches and dried rose hips clearly enough, and the cobweb not at all, until I crossed the street to get a closer look and plan a photo, and even that is a metaphor, the apparent beauty and the emerging deterioration—is it a trap to lure me in?

And seeing the rosebud and the dried rose hips and cobweb in a different interpretation, they are each a species carrying on its existence, the rosebush blooming and fading the previous year to feed and prepare the bush for the next year’s new growth, the tiny spider who built that cobweb finding it a good place the previous autumn to lay her eggs and build a cobweb around them so that when they hatched in spring the web she’d left would catch the first insects for her children to eat in their first days, also seen as a contrast and as a spectrum.

I get some amazing photos when I’m walking to or from getting my car serviced. This place was just two blocks down from my house through a few streets in my neighborhood, others have been adjacent to woods or the creek, old railroad tracks and slow back roads but still within a mile of my house. I walk frequently anyway and always plan ahead with my camera, including those walks to and from a local garage knowing I’ll see things along the way that inspire me visually or inspire a topic for me to discuss with myself and others.

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