July 12/10: Lily

July 12/10: Lily, originally uploaded by susanvg.

Daily Shoot: Focus on a fragment of an object today. Make a photograph that only shows part of an object, not the whole thing.

As I shot this I thought about how one focuses changes one's perspective. If we want this world to flourish and bloom, we have to focus on both the detail and the whole. When we see only details, we forget how everything is interconnected. Pesticides used to kill mosquitoes to eradicate certain diseases caused other issues, equally negative. There is no useless creature or plant.

Our society is driven too much by economics with a look to short term gain and not enough by a sense of the future. How do our actions now affect the future of this planet? It may be costly to convert to more sustainable energy , but if we don't we will have more environmental disasters on the scale of the BP oil spill. Some risks are just not worth taking.

This may be one flower - it nourishes the bees which pollinate our fruit trees which provide food for the birds around here .... As the human population increases we carelessly slash and burn acres of forest, we pave over living spaces, we extract resources. We need to look at the details - what are we trampling on?

Details or big picture - it is never one or the other to get a full understanding.