Learn from the past and

be ready for the future.

Live in the present.

Choosing images to go with the lines of my aphoristic haiku was easy (for the past), serendipitous (for the present), and beset with false starts (for the future).

I remembered one of the photos I took among the ruins of ancient Greek temples at Paestum in the 1970-s.  So stark, so sad, so in the past.  Dwelling on the past would rot the mind.  Learn from it and move on.

The future is fluid, unpredictable, possibly dystopian.  Plan and prepare, but be ready to change plans if an unlikely future unfolds.  (It will.)  I wanted an image that was noncommital but not just blurry.  After several false starts, I took a tight closeup of swirling brushwork in a small painting by an unknown artist, bought decades ago at a charity sale.

Wanting something joyful and ephemeral for the present, I culled some photos of flowering trees taken in 2020.  One jumped out.  The camera catches a bee hovering for a moment where it enhances a larger overall composition.  The admonition to “be in the moment” is like the haiku’s final line and could be tweaked to give this post a title that winks at the final image.