I am lucky enough to have a poet-photographer as one of my friends.
She told me one day about the macro function on my camera (‘do you have a button with a flower picture next to it…? Yes, that’s it…’)
[No, I really didn’t know, and don’t tend to read instructions.]
More importantly, she encouraged me to take and share less ordinary photographs.
Photographs that capture the extraordinariness of everyday things. With her encouragement, I started taking photographs of the wild flowers that I saw as I walked. (I love to walk).
Such a simple sentence:
I started taking photographs of the wild flowers that I saw as I walked
The words can’t do justice to what really happened, changing the way that I see things for ever. Because as I walked, and took photos, I learned to:
- Notice beauty and wonder all around me
- Find evidence of life and growth in the most unlikely of places
- Stumble across the tiniest of flowers, previously hidden from my view
- Bend down, hunker down, lie down in order to notice them properly
- Pay attention to detail
- Listen to what the flowers had to say (yes, they do talk)
- Celebrate colour
- See patterns
- Say thank you
- Wash my eyes in wonder
If I had to try and sum it up, I’d say it was the art of paying attention.
It’s how I want to walk, from here on, through the world.
Drinking in detail, patterns, colour, wonder, thank you.
Eyes washed in wonder.*
~~~
The phrase: ‘Eyes washed in wonder’ flows from a prescription for poetry I’ve been taking for the last few years. It is one of the lines in the Poet’s Prescription by Diana Hendry.
