The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.*
(Georg Hegel)

Most people don’t know how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. Adults, being preoccupied with business and worries and tormenting themselves with all kinds of petty details, gradually lost the very sight for these riches that children, when they are attentive and good, soon notice and love with all their heart.**
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

I remember telling our children when they were very young, “You look with your eyes, not with your hands.”

How wrong I was.

I am sorry.

May we look with everything we have.

(*Georg Hegel, quoted in John O’Donohue’s Echoes of Memory.)
(**From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)