Did you know there is such a thing as a weeping pine? I never knew. I knew about weeping willows. Yet I found this tree that hung like a weeping willow but had pine needles on it. I am not a tree expert by any degree. I know the trees to which I am alergic. (The answer is all of them.) Pine trees I get because we get one each year for Christmas. Weeping willows I know because, well they are weeping. So I had to go figure this out. So looking online I found that there are about twenty versions of weeping trees. They are not natural but they are pretty. So why the conversation about trees? Give me a minute and I will explain.
 This week I have been away at a conference in North Carolina. It has been a great experience with some great people. Yesterday we were watching a video by a Dewitt Jones. Dewitt spent 20 years as a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. In the video he asks us to consider where do we focus our vision. Sometimes we can miss a shot because we were not willing to give time for the right shot to present itself. Other times we get the picture too quickly and do not step back to consider what we have and what the focus of the picture should truly be. So it sounds like a lot of photography talk and in one sense it is. But it also works as a conversation about life as well.
 I did not really think to much about the video anymore until I was coming back from dinner tonight. A group of us had gone to a restuarant near the hotel. As I was walking back I started trying to focus on what was around me. Or better said, I began to let my focus go. I tried to just open my eyes, disengage my brain and see what might pop up. That is when I found the weeping pine. I had walked past it several times in broad daylight but missed it completely. Yet here, in the dark, it found me. It made me stop and wonder. First I was wondering what kind of tree it was. Next I was wondering how I had missed it. It is pretty in its own way. Then I began to wonder if anyone else wonders about these things or am I truly the nut my family knows I am. Finally I began to wonder what else I had missed.
 We get focused on the tasks ahead of us. We focus on getting to the next thing. We focus on all the things that we need to do to have a life. And in the midst of that I wonder how much of life we have missed. What are the unusual, the different the bits of life that we pass by as we are trying to pursue life as we know it.  Ok, so this is hardly an original question. There is always someone out there telling us that we must truly step back and take time to smell the roses. We need to paddle our boat to the riverbank and step out, sit down and watch the stream go by. There are many other sayings that you have heard as well. The problem is that there is so much to do there does not seem to be time to stop. I know I have been feeling that way. And it seems like if I try to step away for a little bit, things get worse and I have more to deal with. So how am I suppose to stop and smell some stupid flowers that are going to make me sneeze anyway. (First, I am allergic to a lot of things. Second, to my wife, the flowers I give you on Valentines day are not the stupid ones….. Looks like someone will be buying pretty rocks in Febuary.)  But back to the question, how do I take the time to see what is around me? Well, everyone is different, so there is not a one size fits all answer. But I guess we need to lose our focus for a little bit. Whenever people tell me to relax and take a break it just sounds like more work. But to allow a moment to come upon me when I can let go of my focus for just a minute is a moment I have to grab. It might reveal some great truth. I might make me frustrated that nothing is showing up on my schedule. It might just make me late to the next thing. It might just rattle around it my head until I put in on a blog and wait for someone looking for great insight to find that I have just dumped my brain on the keyboard. But I figure that if you were here reading this then maybe you were either interested in weeping pines or you had a minute to quit focusing on what you had been doing to stop and figure out what this was. And If that revealed some great truth to you then this was well worth your time. But if you got in trouble because your boss caught you reading this instead of working, well at least it was not a waste of my time.