Once in a lifetime in Daydreaming on the Porch

A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it… he said to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed. The revelation of suddenly seeing what I was blind to only moments before is a sublime experience for me. I can revisit those moments and still feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and the world of another being get pushed back with sudden clarity l, an experience both humbling and joyful.

Robin Wall Kimmerer


There are certain things you can and should seek in life, and, if you faithfully do so, you will find them: friendship, love, contentment with what you already have, beauty in the “simplest,” smallest things. But there are some things — often magical or miraculous — that come to us unexpectedly. They appear to us out of the corner of our eye.

Just such an astonishing and unexpected gift was presented to me the other day. Sometimes, the most sublime things in Nature are not waterfalls or sunsets, but “little things.”

I have been blessed with the ability to both seek, and unexpectedly discover, these treasure sin Nature. And I have long prided myself in being able to find beauty everywhere. I have been born with this gift, thankfully, but also I have trained myself to observe the world around me carefully, and a lifelong passion for photography has opened my eyes to wonders both large and small that I might not otherwise have seen or appreciated.

The other day, I was coming out of the cavernous, warehouse emporium of my local Costco. I turned left to the sidewalk across from the parking lot. As I started to speed up with my cart, something unusual caught my eye. Alongside the store’s huge, outside wall were a series of small camellia bushes. Most of them have bloomed and the flowers were long gone, for they are winter flowers.

Nevertheless, I saw one last camellia, but with something different about it. As I came in closer to see what was going on, I saw this:

https://flic.kr/p/2ojJQgD

Once in a lifetime. I will always treasure this photo.