Let it be — Donna Hopkins

*Mount Olympus Farm, Ruther Glen, Virginia | Summer 2026*

I want to share every word of Wesley Verhoeve’s Sunday post, You Don’t Ask a Tree What It Means. It’s well worth the read, and more importantly, it is incredibly reassuring for those of us who take pictures as our passion.

These are Wesley’s words that most sincerely resonate with me—

When I first started taking photos, I talked myself out of so many of them because I couldn’t answer that question. What’s it about? What’s the point? Why does this one matter? As if a picture has to file a report before it’s allowed to exist.

You don’t ask that of a tree. You let the tree be beautiful.

And I would argue the same is true for flowers. One of the reasons that I continue to return to flowers as photographic subjects is that they resist authorship. They do not need to be optimized or rearranged. They arrive complete.

Wesley continues . . .

So here’s the permission, if you want it. That photo you keep not taking because you can’t explain it, take it. The one sitting in your archive that you’ve never shown anyone because you wouldn’t know what to say about it, it doesn’t owe you a statement. It’s allowed to just be.

And that is enough.