As a child, many of us undoubtedly read a magazine called “Highlights.” If so, you will remember a featured page in each issue where one searched for “hidden pictures.” This was my “go-to” page in every issue of Highlights, living up to its motto of “fun with a purpose.” Fascinated with the necessity of looking with focused attentiveness, with searching shapes and contours, and with discovering intricate details, that “search and find” puzzle both absorbed and distracted my attention during most visits to the pediatrician’s office.

While walking this morning, my gaze fell upon an autumnal leaf suspended in midair beneath an oak tree. Abruptly awakened by the conundrum of a leaf floating in mid air with no visible means of support, it stopped me in my tracks. As if speaking, it drew my attention into the circumstance, as if inviting to look more closely.

Can you find the oak leaf in this photo (left)?

Everything afterwards on the walk felt different to me. Each moment seemed an invitation to “open my eyes”—not so much to the majesty of our canopy of Southern oak trees or to the squirrel with the nut in his jaws making his way down a tree, or, even, to the two orange butterflies hiding in the flowering garden but, rather, to the smaller “hidden” —almost invisible—landscapes of beauty appearing right before my eyes only asking for a moment of “pausing” and with an invitation to “come closer.”

More than identifying the silky connection to the tree, pausing to look more deeply into something on one’s path was the hidden gift

Can you find the orange butterfly in this photo?

A thing that is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows.

Rene Magritte