death valley in bloom.

You know when the same tiny thing comes up three or four times in completely unrelated instances and you feel compelled to look it up because it starts to feel as though it's following you around, hounding you in some weird coincidental way? Well a few weeks ago there was this one day where "Death Valley" kept coming up. When I woke up I could hear my Dad talking to my brother downstairs and he mentioned an anecdote about it in a book he was reading. The night before, I had come across a reference to it in my Environmental Ethics textbook. And THEN (this is just weird) I was playing pictionary with my boyfriend and his friends, and I picked a card with Death Valley as the drawing word.

I'm not saying it's some of sort message from the universe or anything (if it was, it's pretty morbid). But just that it is kind of strange when things like that happen. And I like it. It's almost as though there's this thread running through everything and sometimes you just catch the frayed end of it.

Anyway, on that day it lead to a nice discovery. I looked up some images of Death Valley in bloom. Apparently it only happens very rarely, but when there is an unusual amount of rain, the whole valley (which is one of the hottest, driest places on Earth) becomes this riotous explosion of colour. The flowers have adapted in such a way that allows them to 'hibernate' until heavy rain, so that even though it looks relatively lifeless most of the time, there is always life 'underneath', so to speak.




image from here.


Beautiful. And not so morbid after all.