What happens when I look with fresh eyes?

Everything expands.

To share one of my own small experiences in this regard, in 2017 I started hiking regularly. It’s something I had always loved to do but rarely got the chance and suddenly I had the opportunity to do it more frequently. One April day, I decided to take a break and have my lunch by a stream just a few feet off the trail. I took off my back pack and was about to set it down when my eyes caught a flash of yellow. I looked closer and when I got down on my hands and knees I realized that yellow speck was a tiny but very unusual flower (what I now know is a trout lily – erythronium americanum). I could not believe that something was already growing – and blooming! – in the otherwise brown, barren expanse of woods. Suddenly I started to look around, except now I was looking down instead of up, and I found that there were actually flowers EVERYWHERE. Tiny white, pale pink, and purple blooms peeking through the leaf litter. Though I had been out hiking all day, I hadn’t seen them. But that one little yellow bloom shifted my focus. Instead of looking out over the expanse of woods or waiting for the grand views, my attention was now on the forest floor, where unbeknownst to me before there was so much life and color. Spring beauty, hepatica, anemones – the spring ephemerals. I didn’t know any of their names at the time, but after that experience I became determined to name and know as many local, native wildflowers that I could. I suddenly saw what I thought was just an expanse of bare trees and dead leaves in a whole new light.