So many beautiful things in life ask something of us as observers.

Attention.  Patience.  A willingness to ‘give it up’.

Yesterday I noticed the first three of many violet blooms to come in the ‘sea-of-Leptinella’ bed near my back door.  I was standing upright at the time, and those three perfect little violet flowers appeared from that 7 to 10 foot distance as radiant, violet-colored little dots vibrating within a bed of muted earth-tones.  Beautiful, yes, but not very telling or intimate.

Really seeing them, looking deep into their elegant and diminutive depths asked something more of me.  I needed to get down on hands and knees and then lower my eyes nearly to ground level.  I needed to visit them on their turf and terms.  Yesterday, on that rainy afternoon, such an adventure meant wet knees, wet hands, raindrops on my glasses and cheeks, and stretching my back and legs in ways that standing passively and looking down from on high never would have required.  Then, actually picturing one required all of those things, plus the bother of carefully wiping down my camera afterward.

Was it worth it?  It certainly was to me.

Can you imagine it, the scent of rain and damp earth and tiny little violets newly opened?  Can you hear the wren in the wisteria thirty feet distant, cheerfully singing while I crane my neck and look into a lilliputian wonderland?  Can you hear all those tiny, muffled splatters as thousands of raindrops impact against that tangle of feathery leaves?

In the garden, anything that can call to me with enough of a siren’s voice to bring me down to my knees, well that seems like a good thing.  Anything that can convince me to change perspectives, to lower myself in order to be uplifted.

A garden from standing height can indeed a beautiful place.  A garden from one’s hands and knees, or one’s belly . . . that is a completely different experience.

I try always to remember that when I set out to picture a garden.  Then, bending low, I go ahead and answer that siren’s call, at least from time to time.