Look closer

Picking a favorite lens is like picking a favorite child - I love them equally for different reasons. But I suppose if someone forced me to throw away every lens and just keep one, I would choose my macro. It makes me embrace what made me fall in love with photography to begin with - noticing the details that I might otherwise overlook.

I researched sunflowers and came across this article - https://www.latimes.com/.../la-sci-sn-sunflowers....
Three things that strike me here
1. That any flower would have this ability to turn 180 degrees to face the sun every day.
2. That mature sunflowers always face east - the more mature, the more willing to face the sunshine and wait for it even when it's nowhere to be found.
3. That, while manipulated during experiments, the sunflowers try SO HARD to continue facing the sun. When they are manipulated away from the sun, their health suffers. When their nature is fiercely manipulated, they become thoroughly confused and move erratically during the night.

All this to say, I am forever grateful to be surrounded by the sunflowers in my life. I am an optimist, but I am prone to consider worst-case scenarios and that can throw me off track into a fit of anxious thoughts. But I have people turning my pot towards the sun daily. And I am very aware of the blessing it is to have that encouragement in my life.

The meditation of falling into nature’s details always opens up connections that I didn’t realize before looking closer. I consider the order and repetition of nature juxtaposed with the beautiful imperfection in other scenes and realize that there truly is a time and place for everything. I love a perfectly rounded dandelion head, all of those poufs lined up in the perfection wish cyclinder, but then I look at the cockeyed partially blown skirt of seeds in another dandelion and am amazed at how genuinely beautiful both arrangements can be, depending on my mood and my eye that day.