the first time around i missed your significance ~ won't do that again
The backstory for this (hopefully) enigmatic haiku is a tale of a search through my photo library. I wanted Christmas pictures to use for the header here in the blog, and searched for Christmas Decorations as a category. The Apple Photos app uses an artificial intelligence (AI) image recognition to categorize and label photos, and while it is sometimes a bit dodgy, there are also some welcome surprises, like the photo below.
It isn’t Christmas decorations, although I can see how the AI “thought” the icicles might be adorning a Christmas tree. It wasn’t even Christmas time when the photo was taken. I snapped it after a late-season snowstorm during the Memorial Day Weekend in late May of 2019, when we were at Little House in the Rockies, in Jefferson, CO. I wrote about that surprise storm last year, including a video.
I have no idea why I didn’t capitalize on that blurry-artsy photo above back when I took it, but it makes me very happy to look at it right now. The red element on the left is our hummingbird feeder, and that blur on the right of it is a hummingbird. I’m in love with the abstraction of it. Here’s another pic from that day, not a great one, but with the bird in focus, albeit backlit.
I love the blurry pic so much more! Stumbling on it during my search for Christmas decoration pics was a delightful gift. My vantage point from 18 months later is so different than when I took the photo and the story was the storm. The story today is how the picture makes me feel. I wonder how it makes you feel.
Remembering my word of the year, Mindfulness, it strikes me that this is a metaphor for so many other things, whether they be good, bad, indifferent, ugly, beautiful… it’s so easy to miss something significant in a situation, a conversation, a photo, if we don’t take the time to reflect and be mindful.
I don’t want to miss the significance. I want to be true to the sentiment in the haiku.
© 2020, Glover Gardens
