Standing before my father's gravestone, I found myself fixated on the small dash between two dates—1943–2024. In that hyphen lay everything: every hope, every disappointment, every moment of transcendence and simplicity that constituted a human life.

This work takes its title from a Japanese death poem: "Flowers are flowers because they fall.” The paradox is essential—beauty exists precisely because of impermanence, not in spite of it. What we witness, what arrests us, what makes us ache with attention, is the moment before dissolution.

These images are meditations on transience rendered visible. Working with intentional blur and motion, I attempt to photograph time itself—to capture not the flower but the falling. The work resists photography’s traditional function of freezing and preserving, instead embracing the medium's capacity to register change, movement, ephemerality. I imagine a time-lapse of all humanity appearing as brief blooms of color against darkness, beautiful because it’s fleeting.

This is contemplative work, rooted in twenty-five years of spiritual practice and influenced by Minor White's understanding of the photograph as metaphor. Like the dash on a tombstone, these images compress the vastness of experience into visual gestures—not to diminish life's complexity but to distill its essential character: we are here, briefly gorgeous because we fall.