Twofers

We think we see what's there. Today I did not, until I saw what I saw with my naked eyes coupled with what the camera saw and then showed me.

To wit: I spotted two tiny butterscotch skippers, each half the size of a clover flower on which they dined. Zooming in on one, moving closer and closer, I finally spooked it. When he flew off, I saw his companion sharing the yellow canyon-bloom: a teeny tiny katydid nymph. Two for one!

Then I spotted something shiny and wet, translucent, brown, clinging to a reed. And a second on another blade. Spiders? I couldn't tell. They were beyond reach in the reeds, darkening after the sun had retreated. I snapped anyway, extending my arm out as far over the lake's edge as I dared. When I got home and downloaded my pictures, I found not spiders, but dragonflies in their exuviae, beginning their transformation, with dragonflies I never saw behind them.

How could I be so blind?

But surely we are all blind to most of the lives unfolding, beginning, and ending in the air around us, in the ground and water, in ourselves and on our skin, in our towns and country and alien lands beyond our boarders; we are blind to most of the companions riding on our own blossom, Earth.

Hamlet was right: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [my philosophy]."