Slowing Down and Looking Closely

That Tree by Mark Hirsch

If you watched PBS the other evening, you probably saw the documentary about Mark Hirsch's year of photographing an old bur oak down the road from his house.  He used an Iphone 5 and the photos are incredible.  Here is a link to a site A Year In the Life of a Tree that shows many of those photos.  Check it out and enjoy the compositions of the artist and the beauty of that one corn field.

 At the end of the documentary they showed a scene of Mark climbing the tree.  He talked about how after spending a few weeks with spectacular sunset shots, he started to slow down and look closer at all of the surprises the tree offered to him and as the year went by he found such joy in that slowing down and looking closely and in approaching the tree in the way a child would and an adults forgets - lying on the ground, climbing the tree, looking closely at the insects on the bark.   So enjoy a few moment of vicarious slowing down by looking at his photos and thinking of the beauty of our earth.  This is a good carbon reduction practice as it helps us cherish the earth we have so that we want to keep it beautiful.

We did a bit of our own slowing down and looking closely at the zoo today with the grandsons. In the tropical forest alone we saw - cage free - many beautiful birds, a blue frog, a tiny lizard and a nesting heron and the boys, in the fashion of children, collected fallen leaves and sat down on the mulched path to plant a garden.

Playing at Making a Garden at the Zoo