Rubbish Flower: Backstory & Inspiration

It was a sunny spring afternoon and I was walking home from the library with my daughter when hail came.

It was one of those weird moments where conditions change so abruptly and so radically that the experience feels almost cinematic–as though the weather were not the chaotic result of atmospheric turbulence but, rather, something intentional and contrived and meaningful. The wind kicked up and, in the space of a few minutes, the sky was darkened and sun was blacked out and we found ourselves buffeted by bead-sized pellets of ice. And we guarded our faces against the hail and picked up our pace to make it home before conditions got any worse.

And, as we walked, there was a brief moment where my attention fell on the empty street: all the intricate eddies and whorls and currents of the wind were suddenly made visible by the presence of the hail. And I was struck by how complex the patterns of the wind are–and how beautiful. And not only beautiful in a superficial aesthetic sense but also beautiful on a deeper mathematical level. Before I was an artist I used to work as a theoretical physicist, and one of my great loves back then was the study of hydrodynamics and turbulence and all the associated complex nonlinear dynamics of those systems. This was a subject I hadn’t thought about for some years and, there, on that empty street, buffeted by hail, it all suddenly came back to me.

Although all this played out in the space of a few seconds, the experience stayed with me for quite some time. Although this small experience certainly didn’t hold much sway over the practicalities of my life, it still seemed like an important reminder of how much beauty and complexity there is all around us, lurking just below the surface, waiting for someone to notice it. The wind was always beautiful, I realized, I just hadn’t noticed it until then.

This experience would, eventually, become the basis of my short story about the Rubbish Flower, which will be a part of my upcoming magazine project, Strange Flowers.