I got outside today. Just walked around the yard looking at how much work the yard is going to need — and frankly, dreading it. But there were these little purple flowers? To be honest I’m not sure they aren’t just dolled up weeds. In any case I decided that with Spring actually here, at least I think it’s here, it did snow yesterday.
I decided that it was a good day to take out the macro lens and get close to the flowers. The thing about macro, is that you can have a super shallow depth of field. You can focus on one thing and have the rest just fall out of focus. You can see it in this picture. I wanted some of the veins in the leaves and the yellow center to be in focus and the rest just to fade into the background.
I took several pictures with different parts of the bloom in focus and other parts blurred. It made me think that what we see depends on where we focus. Sometimes, things like cancer take the focus from the otherwise amazing or beautiful things that can surround us every day. And it can take a long time before our focus comes back to anything but the disease and the suffering. There are triggers that mess with us long after the sickness is gone. Places we once love are ruined we can’t enjoy things we once loved.
But sometimes after a while, things just adjust themselves a little bit and the things we thought were ruined forever come back into focus, and just like that we see joy in the things that we felt we had lost. Even though sometimes it still hurts, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. We can even find new purpose in doing things despite the fact that something is missing. It took me months before I could go into Contender, but now, even though I miss my brother every time I ride my bike and I remember sitting on his wheel or the one time he hit a tree and I beat him in a cyclocross race. Then I feel a headwind and I think — there’s my brother. And I can almost hear him telling me that he just wants me to be strong, not that he’s just being the stereotypical mean big brother. I miss him all the time, but I still feel like he’s around when I ride, just like he used to be.