man made

well . . . if not man made, then woman made, i guess. this nodding onion displayed a beautiful droopingly curved sort of swan neck when i clipped it. it was perfect just the way it was. and then i put it in water, and it drank so thirstily that it began to straighten out, and lose its perfect curvilinear droop. so i tried to bend it back the way it had been all by itself before i had come along, and instead of bending back, it broke. i think there is a metaphor somewhere in there about nature, and engineering, and human intervention in healthy natural systems, but i’m not going to try to draw that conclusion for you. what i will say is that i found it perfectly beautiful in the ground, and find it imperfectly perfectly beautiful as it is now. i don’t know where that places me as an environmentalist but for the purposes of this photo, i’m choosing to be an apolitical aesthete. go ahead. judge me as you will.

nodding onion (Allium cernuum)