1 photo 1000 thoughts

"When you are alive, you are offered thorns. When you die, they give you roses" Anatole France.

The landscape in this photo looks ordinary. Nothing too impressive about it. The thorny tree and the flowers on the soil are not bathed by the special, gloomy, romantic twilight or the triumphant summer morning's sun rays. This visual and natural composition is not stigmatized by the menace of worth mentioning weather events (snowfall, heavy storm, etc.) so to attract the attention of a passersby. Only a thoughtful mind can get messages from this image and communicate it to others. It requires emotional depth or a specific kind of Eros for wisdom (philosophy) so you can distinguish the arrays of...

symbols that tell the story human nature.

Prima facie, the tree with the painful thorns on the branches and the humble flowers with these gold-yellow petals could be everywhere and nowhere. It is located near the Archaeological Museum of Corinth. Helen - Oreithyia Koulizaki -, teacher of Greek Literature and author, is the person that in a tour of archaeological and historical interest, began to contemplate for the content of the aforementioned visual composition: «At the top we see thorns. Pain and struggle towards Heaven. And on the soil there is earth-rooted beauty, the flowers. Who wins in this fight? What is finer, more subtle and worthwhile? What is more enduring in the passing of time? All that we call beautiful and charming are temporary? What lasts forever is only pain and thorns and torment? Or maybe via the first we can achieve the second? And all this beauty is not obscured by the volume of suffering that sums up our earthly beings - such as the shaded small flowers under the tree? Is it not true that sometimes beauty cries out for help and finds refuge in old persons, outmoded situations that are full of spikes? Remember the young ladies that are married to old tycoons...

Decay

Somehow that's life itself. Just like the photo. At the beginning we live the carelessness of childhood, our teenage years, we enjoy beauty, colors, dreamy scents of optimism and power of will. Happiness is not just words on books... but a concrete fact and valuable experience. The damage of years lost forever has not yet made its appearance. The worldview that everything is ephemeral sounds abstract - more like an hypothesis than truth. Does anyone on earth have the slightest idea that he will die someday when he is drunk from life's tasty wine? On the start of our route towards self knowledge the physical, moral and spiritual decline does not exist – even if they exists we do not hear the sound of their hands knocking the door of our mortal bodys. However, on the path upward, slowly, we begin to realize that all things, colors, senses and flavors around us are being reduced and they continue to do so. Losing becomes a habit. Just at this point we see the starting of the martyrdom period. We understand why these thorns on the branches of the tree point to the clouds .

Some other would insist that the two dominant symbols of photography (flowers and thorns) have no... hostile relationship between each other but complementary. They coexist. Flowers and thorns walk hand in hand to the end.