I am so lucky to be able to live in a place that has no shortage of different flowers and plants. The truth is I never used to appreciate flowers and it is only after I started to do photography then I started to notice the small things, like the fragrance that comes from them! I didn’t know that flowers can smell so nice, I must have been really unconscious.

Peering into the world of little flowers, it is like another dimension, it is like the stuff of dreams.

Imagine that you are shrunk really small and you start to walk through a small patch of flowers. That is how it feels like doing macro photography among these delicate and beautiful life forms. Such a sight to behold.

Hopefully, it will inspire you to experience and see it for yourself.

Some of the most wonderful things in the world are free for you to explore.

A friend once asked me, “why do you always seem to make a place more beautiful than it really is in your photographs?” She said that whenever she has been to any of those places, it is always dull and boring and just doesn’t seemed as nice.

This made me ponder about what beauty really means. I used to think that the world is all dark, gloomy and boring as hell. There was a time when I was always living in my head and living in a world so busy I did not stop and really look around me. I would pass by the most beautiful sunset or a flower without even taking a glance. Beauty was all about success and material stuff. I would talk about how beautiful this car and that house is and I would miss what the world is showing me in front of my eyes; I was so blind I couldn’t see.

The fact is what we think as reality is actually an illusion. We base our concept of beauty through the filters of our accumulated experiences and preferences. We might not even see the same colors; your perception of red might be different from mine. How many of us can really see things the way it really is?

Most of the time, the mind distorts reality because it has a tendency to generalize. There are advantages and disadvantages to these workings of the mind but let’s not discuss the disadvantages for now and focus on the advantages we have.

The sole main advantage is that we have a choice in every moment.

We have a choice to focus on the beautiful or the ugly.

Who we are is what our state of being is. The challenge is to be conscious enough so that we are happy and joyful all the time and the world will reflect back to us all the joyous and beautiful things in our lives.

The opposite is also true, if we are depressed and stressful, we will automatically focus on the depressing and ugly things in life. It doesn’t just stop there, our thoughts have a snowballing effect, all the negative thoughts will attract more and more of the same and you will end up so far down the road that it is very difficult to get back.

Let’s take gratitude, one of the most powerful emotions in life as an example. If we are grateful for being alive, we will start to see the beauty of life in all other living things such as the trees, flowers, animals and other fellow humans; we will be grateful for just being here on earth and soaking up all the beautiful sights our world has to offer.

That is one of the greatest treasures of life, to be able to witness the beauty of creation.

We might not be able to be in a meditative state all the time due to the distractions of our thoughts but we can start the process of awareness by filtering our minds through understanding. The light of understanding will dispel the darkness of judgmental thoughts and allow us to see the things as it really is. This understanding will make all the sights in the world more vibrant, more colorful and more vivid; even the darkest and the gloomiest scene will become the most beautiful contrast one can see and appreciate.

Understanding this illusion of beauty will allow us to see the world in new ways. The flowers that we passed by every day will suddenly jump out at us, beckoning us to just stop and notice and realizing how beautiful our world is. If we can really see, we will notice that wherever we go, we will always see something beautiful and interesting.

How does one understand the miracle of a flower?

If we are aware of the intelligence of the source of creation flowing around us, we will start to notice the miracle. The miracle of seeing the potential of a whole forest in a single seed. The miracle of seeing a seed sprouting and blossoming with all the aid and support in its life energies from the universe. If we stop living in the mind, we will see that we are well taken care of—taken care of by all the support of the intelligence that sustains all life; It doesn’t require you to think for sustaining your heartbeat.

If we are not able to see the results of this creative power from the source of life, then I am afraid that there is nothing more to see.

We are all here on this journey of exploration. The world is our playground. In the end, it is not about the things we own because we cannot own a thing forever; it is about the experience of exploration and the people we touched along the way.