Look It…

Binoculars are quite the thing, aren’t they? We have a few pairs, here and there. You see, we live with about 150 acres around us. In the country. So we get the wildlife. And we love to watch that wildlife.

Both of us, my partner Mary & I, get great joy from our daily “encounters” with nature. We have very frequent sightings of a pack of deer.  Mostly eight girls who hang out here together. A cluster of mothers, and daughters, and friends. Their daily visits make us happy. We watch what they do, and how they interact, when they come to eat corn and apples.

The endless flow of birds is a good thing too. All the kinds. From Woodpeckers to Nuthatches, to the tiny little Wrens. All vying for food. In droves. There is so much to see out here. I might call Guinness to report the world’s fattest squirrels.

Yes.  There is the all of it.

We like to watch and soak it in. But on occasion, we find it necessary to explore more closely. To get a better look. And that is where the binoculars come in. They will zoom right toward the finest little feather, and the coarsest patch of fur.

Their job, you see, (no pun intended), is to bring far away objects into focus. But the trick of it is, you have to hold them up to your eyes correctly. If you turn them backward, they make everything look very, very small.

As an apparatus, the effect of the binocular largely depends on us and how we use them. “Oh my goodness, you are the Jolly Green Giant. Presto-Change-O. You are a Tiny Little Elf.”  It all depends on which lens we hold up to our little watchful eyes.

Our minds are sort of like binoculars too. If we look through our mind’s eye, our perspective, in a way that is small, and limited, we will only see a very small part of the picture. All crunched up and out of focus. But if we flip things around, and use our minds in a big way, a way which is filled with understanding, and compassion, and love, we begin to see the whole blessed picture. We can see clearly, those things we could not see before. If we use our big lens.

======

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucius

=======

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature

========

“Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

=======