Okay, then zoom in. Focus. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Don’t pick up more than you can carry. And I tried this. You’ve already read how I tried this—by focusing on the leaves, the dew, the lemons, the flying bug.

But those were not the sources of the beauty. The beauty came from the whole scene of the backyard. All of it, working together in codependent unison somehow.

It was like a piece of abstract algorithmic art that my friend recently made and showed to me. In the center of the piece, I saw a face—a lizard head with one eye, sharp teeth, and a stuck-out tongue. I thought if I looked closer, I could see the reptilian head more clearly. So I zoomed in on the image on my computer, but the apparent image of the lizard head dissolved. It was even more abstract, the farther I zoomed in.

The point is: I didn’t want to zoom in on the backyard. I wanted to somehow wrap all the way around it and capture the amount of detail just as it was.