The Lowdown on Beauty

Today, I’m praising God for creatures who cannot read the headlines. Spring arrives with jubilance no matter what. My bird feeders are crowded with male goldfinches who have changed into yellow tuxes for breeding season. The redbud tree is so eager that pink clusters of small flowers burst from the bark before a leaf has appeared on a single branch. These eye-level explosions of beauty are so attention-getting that I sometimes forget to watch where I’m going—as I did yesterday, when I stepped into a pothole the guineas had made for their spring dust baths and fell to my knees beside the split rail fence.

Good thing, too, because if it hadn’t happened, I might never have seen the wee forest of moss blooming below the bottom rail, or the matchstick-red tips on the lichen that covered the log above. A small yellow flower—just one—bloomed by my left hand, while a micro meadow of dog violets spread out to my right. The sun was warm, and the sky was blue, so when Socko the cat came over to lie down next to me, I decided to stay put for a while. There was nothing on my to-do list remotely as pleasant, and spring doesn’t last forever.

While I was down there, I decided to find out what else I was missing, since I tend to look high instead of low for almost everything of value. First, I went back into the house to fetch my phone and a sewing needle—the phone to document my research, the needle to add scale to my photos. After that, I lost all track of time.

Had I ever walked so slowly, or searched with such care for things I could not see without stooping? Bright colors were the major lures at first—the solar gold of a wild buttercup, the peachy wings of a maple seed pod. Then patterns began to emerge—the growth rings of a young pine brought down in the last ice storm, the green pennants of a fern still unspooling toward the sun. It was like a third eye had opened in my head.

After half a mile, I could no longer keep my eyes on the ground. Discipline vanished in the same direction as time. Plus, the lens was getting in my way. How could I decide what part of the wild azalea should be in the frame? How could I turn the downy feather stuck on a twig into a still life when it never stopped billowing in the wind?

The magnification was all that kept me going. I snapped a clutch of tiny pollen cones that swelled into a nest of ostrich eggs, a snowflake of lichen on a rusted gate that turned into a shipwreck in an arctic sea. Then there was the small spiral of a muscadine vine that looked most like an upright snake coiled to strike. When my stomach rumbled, I realized the whole morning had gone by, only it hadn’t, really. I had gone into it instead, like Alice into Wonderland.

After I came back out and headed to the house, I had to make the scales fall over my eyes again, or it might have been dinner time before I got there. There were a thousand more things to see that I had to pass right by. Every one of them offered me a romance I had to decline. Otherwise, the work would never get done, the email would never be answered. Maybe this is why so many of us choose the big picture over the small one? Who has time for so much beauty?

Now I’ve stashed the photos in a folder on my phone called “Eye of the Needle,” to remind me how slender it is, how much falls away when you focus on it, and what a bunch of glory waits on the other side.