Sedate
Everything happening in my head went quiet. Not gradually, suddenly. One stem of lavender on a nature strip, backlit by the late winter sun, and I was no longer anywhere near the fourteen-hour days or the conversations that could have gone badly or the brain that hadn't had a quiet hour in weeks. I was simply there, crouched on a footpath in a part of town I'd never walked, with nowhere else to be.
That's what this piece holds. Not the lavender, but the silence that arrived when I dropped to its level.
I had left the house because the afternoon light came through my window at an angle that felt like an invitation outside. I packed up early, grabbed my dog and my camera almost as an afterthought. When you're that depleted, creativity feels very far away. I let my dog choose where we went. We ended up in a neighbourhood of wide streets and cottage gardens and older houses with large blocks. And then the corner, and the lavender, and one stem standing slightly taller than the rest.
I moved off the footpath to let the low afternoon sun fall behind it. I got close. I got low. Everything else stopped.
The backlight inside the image, the subtle lens flare, the way the sun moved through the glass as though there were two, only revealed themselves a week later, when I finally sat down with what I'd found. Sedate is evidence of how completely, for those few minutes, I had returned to myself.
