Photo: Amitai Asif

At first glance I wasn’t sure what had made my nephew stop to snap this photo of a monochromatic, drab dry bulb laying on the ground. Then I took another look and understood: in it lay the promise; the potential stored; the strength of tender yet tenacious tendril roots that had worked to nourish the more glamorous aspects of whatever plant this had been and maybe still was. Curiosity raised my eyebrows for the few seconds it took me to realize which side of this natural structure was ‘up’ or ‘down.’ I found myself pondering the mysteries and histories held by this brown bulb – now bare and barren on dry dirt – in the rain it had drunk and energies it had generated and the earthworms that had undulated around it … in the story as it would be told by the few leaves still left clinging, dry but home.

How incredible. How incredibly mundane. How marvelously so.

For The Photo Challenge