Today's Picture to Ponder Photos
Red Hibiscus flowers on bush in my back yard. The upper photo is of the underside of the flower, backed by my privacy fence.

Today's Self-Reflecting Queries
Today I invite you to look into your life:

1. Are there people or situations in your life looming large, right in front of you, whom you are walking around or ignoring? These might not even be intentional actions.

If so, I invite you to stop, look at and spend some time with what you are now seeing. Is any thing new opening up for you?

2. Are there beautiful objects, people and/or situations in your life that you look at all the time from only one perspective? If so, I invite you to take some time and examine it/them from several directions and then to, again, pay attention to what might be opening up for you.

My "story" of the day, leading to these questions -The red hibiscus bush, the source of these flowers, is quite large, almost five feet in height and probably, at least, four feet across. Right now a couple of the branches are crawling across the ground. The bush sits outside my patio window and, when I open my eyes to it, it is the first thing I see every morning as I walk out onto my patio to sit and write my "morning pages."

The point to today's story is that the hibiscus bush is also right in front of the maranta - prayer plant - I've been photographing daily. See Unconditional Love - The Maranta Story on my blog. At times, I've even stepped over the branches to get closer to the prayer plant. And the hibiscus is only a foot or two away from the passionflower vine that I've also been photographing daily.

In the case of both the maranta and passionflower, I have taken on the theme of observing daily the opening up, growth and expansion of these two plants. I've moved from "peeling away the layers of an onion, analogous to peeling away the layers of ourselves" (note the several blog posts) to observing "adding on," so-to-speak.

In my mind, the hibiscus bush had no relevance to what I had honed in on for daily picture-taking focus, so I simply ignored it. Then one recent day, the camera and I did stop and pay attention to the delicacy of the front view of one of the flowers in the late afternoon light and to the beauty, grace and stateliness of the underside of another.

We, thus come back to today's queries. Where in your life may you be ignoring beauty that is right in front of you? And, where are you only paying attention to one view or perspective?

As always, have fun and play with these questions.