Few things feed my soul like heading outdoors with my camera.

This morning, I went flower picking.

Visually, anyway.

It honestly doesn’t matter to me if the photos come out or not. So many don’t. I know my eye sees many things my camera never will – and it’s really just the noticing that hooks my heart in the first place.

My pace slows. My breathing deepens. I see the world as the tiniest of details and wide, wide open at exactly the same time.

It’s the time and place of  photography which pleases me. The act of walking out there in the world. The movement of my life down the road and around the corner and past the field.

I smell the hay – mowed just a few days ago. I notice the battering the black-eyed Susans took at the hands of last night’s storm. I see someone painted the ceiling of the old farmhouse porch haint-blue. I wonder how to capture the Queen Anne’s lace breezily swaying by the granite stone wall.

And in the time it took to walk across the yard, I both befriended a hummingbird and sympathized with a swallowtail butterfly hassled by bees nectaring in the cone flowers.

I experiment. I learn. I sun. Smell. Smile.

I breathe – unrestricted – whatever cares I came out with, left roadside a ways back.

Get yourself outside.

And see.