Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N79.

Tues. April 21, 2009 - Carnations are interesting flowers, in that depending on place and culture, they can be seen as cheap, throw away flowers of the industrial flower age or as a flower of celebration and history, or as flowers of ritual, time and place.

In California for most of my lifetime, they are the cheapest flowers that one can buy in a mixed bunch at the supermarket or on a busy street corner. To purchase carnations says that the buyer did not think, as well as the grocery store carnations smell bad in a clean sort of industrial way.

According to various sources online, carnations have a grand and long line as a meaningful and majestic flower through history. And last year, when I was in the south of India, they were everywhere and beautiful. Bright red and yellow carnations floating in big bowls of water, being strewn in the streets of Chennai by a funeral procession, or in the streets of Panaji as a shrine, used as the flowers in garlands for wedding and laced along gates & buildings, temples, and trees.

Given the context and color and look of the carnations in India, they did not convey cheap and industrial, but were lovely, sacred, and vibrant.

When I saw this typically modern American red & white carnation washed up in the intertidal zone of the beach today, instead of thinking of my not so great American carnation associations, I thought of the loveliness of the flower in India and its role in ritual.

I wondered who tossed it in the Pacific Ocean and for what life occasion. Then, with the diurnal ritual known as the tides, the Pacific brought it to the beach. And I photographed it.