BUTTERCUP SEASON

It’s buttercup season again. At this time of the year, the park glows yellow with a sea of flowering buttercups, carpeting the fresh spring grass. I went out today and sat right in the middle of the golden ocean.

It’s nice to see the contrasts. Blue sky, white clouds, green grass, yellow flowers - almost just the way a child might draw it, with simple colours crayoned across the paper. Perhaps, I found myself wondering, this is the simplest view of the world.

I’d like to simplify things a lot. If I feel a certain way, I don’t want to over-complicate it, analyse it, turn it inside-out. I’d much rather do the simplest, most obvious thing and be called ‘naive’ if I have to. After all, it’s always seemed to me that growing up has been largely overrated. If you don’t have the watercolours or the acrylics... get the crayons out.

Similarly if I have something to say, I really don’t want to couch it in fluffy language if I can export it more simply. Sure, true things can be harder to say, but only because we’ve trained ourselves to second-guess each other. I constantly feel as though the world should be simpler here.

I took a photograph of some buttercups close up. I was trying to get the camera to focus on the foreground and blend the grass, trees and sky out of the focal length. It occurred to me that every buttercup I found with my camera was different - intricate, elegant, irreproducibly radiant. There’s nothing like nature to show how you how the complex can be made to look so simple. 

The deeper you look, the more you see, of course. And yet in some ways, both views, whether watercolour or wax crayons, whether intricate, individual flowers and petals, or a sea of yellow under a blue sky - are exquisitely beautiful. Because I think we all are.