I used to love childhood books without words, the ones similar to "I Spy Books", were an entire city or landscape would be drawn in folk style, always leaving something to discover. I loved looking at these books with my own boys when they were younger, making sense of their expanding world in an artistic way.
In my teenage years I became fascinated with biology. While visiting my uncle, who has an impressive microscope collection, I discovered the big world of things invisible to the human eye. On a rainy day, my uncle would set up one of his microscopes, and invite me, my sister and cousins to view several objects through the eye tube. Zooming in, one could see new geometric patterns, different colors or tiny organisms moving.
Zooming in, digging deeper, scratching below the surface, finding that one special speck that gives the moment meaning and lets everything else move into the background. This ability does not always require a device, as I found out much later, when I was living in Seoul, South Korea. Living smack in the middle of this huge and vibrant metropolis of more than 10 million people, not counting the surrounding suburbs and smaller towns that would easily double that number), it could feel very overwhelming. My family's escape plan in that case would be to recharge our green batteries, oftentimes walking along the Han River. Wildflower fields grew along the bike path, interspersed with willow trees, would create the illusion of a countryside idyll.
If you expanded your field of vision, bridges, high rise apartment buildings, power plants, city highways choked with rush hour traffic and green mountains in the distance would enter the picture. This was the moment to zoom in! Put your blinders on for urban sprawl and appreciate this patch of beauty.
The whole picture of this megalopolis that I learned to call my home and miss when we moved, was taken apart at that moment into a small piece which would give me much appreciation for what it means to see things from a different perspective.
