Monet’s Iris

The brush doesn’t land; it arrives with intent

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_(1924-1925)_Claude_Monet_(W1836).jpg

I stand at the pond’s edge, and the singular I begins to fray. The yellow irises – insistent as flaming embers – are not static facsimiles. They are a way of life, bending and craving, etching their edges in and out of the blue. I feel my breath hitching to the rhythm of the brushstrokes and read messages in their intent.

I see a habitat of quietude where imagination is the most persistent voice. My human mind wants to categorize the water, to pin that cavernous blue to a ledger of colors. I want to build a wall between my skin and the cool loam, yet I am allured, needing to know where I end, and this world begins.

A breeze arrives. The irises lean; stems bend by the weight of their own grace. They serve no command while I still feel the familiar, unbelieving restraint – the desire to be the sole arbiter of what is real.

I breathe, and the friction softens. My feet feel damp – having stepped closer to the edge. I let the brushstrokes take me. I am no longer the watcher; I am the cadence of the water. Change permeates me, promising that I am allowed to dissolve, that the shifting colors are not a loss of form but the depth of experience.

I choose to see the light held by a filament in a stem. Once it was a trail, etched by the fiber of a brush. I sense the entanglement. I am not looking at the irises or the impressionism; I am being observed by the current of the water, both of us rearranged by the same invisible turbulence moving through the cirrus canopy. The singular I has finished fraying.

There is history here. The loam beneath my feet is a memory of stone ground down by eons, offering itself to the iris, which offers itself to the light. We are imagined into being – alive.

Nothing here wishes to be concluded; everything only wishes to continue becoming.

The desire to define this—to make it a finished thing—is fading—the garden beckons. Don’t go, it whispers, in endless synchronous drifts.

Where petals meet air, edges blur – not through carelessness, but through kinetic energy. Pigment is a record of motion, thick and tactile, capturing the iris as it pivots and leans – tendu, jeté, glissade – never losing balance.

A strand of breeze shifts and the dancers rise in a collective pirouette. The cobalt pond ripples, shattering imagery into shimmers – shards of light waiting for the eye to make them real.

The boundaries between figurative dancers, my human observation, and liquid sky dissolve – though perhaps to you, I’ll begin as part of yellow bending toward the blue.

Thank you for sharing!

Jjb