Today, I realized that I’ve been looking at the flowers all wrong.

The ones that have filled the wood aisles of Parque Juarez for the annual Candelaria Festival. Nearly every pathway is filled with flowers, succulents, cacti, saplings, herbs, seeds, soils, exotics, and verdant things indescribable by a casual traveler like me.

This isn’t my first Candelaria, bucko.

When they’ve held them during the past five years, I’ve been there, And we’ve bought more than a few things, too. Filled wheelbarrows, green cabbie trunks, and backseats with impulse buys fueled on flora highs.

I’ve strolled through this garden of floricultural delights several times since it began last week. And I will return a few times more.

The thing I realized today is that the more I walk among the gardens, the less I see. I think it is a variation of what my friend and one-time colleague, the nature writer Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.”

(Click on any image to enlarge it.)

You see, my eyeballs have been bouncing off traffic and pedestrians and cobblestones and variegated sidewalks, while my over-stimulated brain has been plugged into podcasters, delivering the word in stereo.

I turn into the park but I haven’t turned off the energy.

So I cruise along the pathways, passing beautiful and delicate plantings like they were the soda aisle in Comer. The plants may as well be labels on bottles. I see a hundred variations on the color green, I see abstract washes of brilliant colors, I vaguely register shapes as leaves, needles, branches, plantings, bushy things, vines …. but it is a rush, a crush, a horticultural floe.

I take it all in but I see nothing. It is just one big salad bowl spinner.

Today was different. I sat on a bench and wrestled my breath back into my lungs. L repeated the phrase “Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No one to be.”  Until I was no one. Just me. It was then that it occurred to me that perhaps I should stop looking AT everything. Take small bites. Hover over a section of plants, like a bird. Peer deeply into the veins on the leaves, the needles on the cacti, the variegated edges, the swirling patterns.

Details. Inhale the details. Walk slowly, and breathe deeply. See with the heart, the senses, the brain, as well as the eyes. Inhale the details.

I suppose I looked a bit eccentric.

But these are the results. Not plants but colors, patterns, geometrics, relationships. Whole forests encased in a box full of fledgling nursery propogations. Whole universes in a half-dozen one-pint buckets.

The bird’s eye view. Mindfully taken. Framed in a photo.