What do you see?

I posted this on Instagram on June 25. In one of the comments I was chastised:

Did you have to take a picture of Mary’s pots that are mostly dead? Go out a get her some plants and soil and plant them and then take your picture.

I was surprised. But I have to admit, there are pots in the photo, they are Mary’s, and they are empty. So my critic was not wrong. However, I do have a defense or explanation.

While I see the pots and they are in the photo, they are not what I was focusing on. I was attempting to capture the backyard as a whole. I was hoping the eyes of viewer would be drawn to the chair and thus the backyard. Everything else was sort of intended to be a frame for this: the pots, the tree, the lamp. I was trying to capture the ambiance of the evening. This is reinforced by the fact that the original Instagram post was a video with the sound of crickets and birds. And my own description of the video was, “Sunday night in the South. Breeze blowing. Might rain. Nice.” Ambiance of the moment.

I obviously failed with at least this one person. And as I said earlier, they are not wrong, there are empty pots in the photo. There are several things wrong in the photo – the lamp is broken, the tree has a limb that is hanging too low, there is a stick lying askew. It obviously was not staged!

As I thought about all this I decided a good question is, What do you see? I don’t mean merely this photo. I mean any photo. Any vista. Life. What do you focus on? I think about the twelve spies Moses sent to check out the land. They came back with two reports. Both saw a land flowing with milk and honey, but ten saw the giants, two saw God. There were clearly giants in the land. Ten spies focused on them. Two saw them but focused on God.

What do you see?

What are you looking at?

Oh yeah, about the chair in the middle of the backyard. I often sit in that chair during the day and read. Even on a hot day, it is really comfortable. And here is the view from the chair on June 27

I really like my backyard!