A field of wildflowers, a bee, or a butterfly don't ask to be noticed the way a canyon wall a banded hawk or the night sky do. There's no single moment to catch, no drama to wait for. What is offered instead is color, intricacy, delicacy and precision: more of it than the eye quite realizes exists until it's brought into view up close and personal, or on a grand scale scattered across acres in a pattern designed by One greater than us. Bees and butterflies have fur? Flowers grow in rocks? A field can turn into an ocean of yellow?
To really see it, you have to slow down past the point most people bother. Stand next to a lavender patch, a thistle grove or a butterfly bush and take the time to wait for the denizens of those places to show; walk to the edge of a field of color and enjoy nature's fleeting art show; marvel that life actually finds a way to shed forth its beauty in the rockiest of environments.
Stay a while, get low, get close. The individuals come. They hover. They light. They bloom. They show off their complex lives. A single flower is an amazing miracle of perfect visual construction. A field of them is sensory overload.
These photographs come from the kind of patience, and quiet, unhurried attention it takes for a field or a bush or a grove to stop looking like scenery in your backyard or on a hillside and start looking like thousands of small, very specific lives giving our world an added portion of uniqueness and unmeasurable richness.
