By Wayne Hinshaw
For the Salisbury Post

Our world is filled with all kinds of things to see and cast our view upon.  Some are not very important to us, but some are special to us in our lives.

Sitting in my front yard are three old rocking chairs that my wife placed under the the limbs of an old maple tree. The chairs are broken, with the paint peeling. One chair was never painted so it wears the gray color of aging wood. Only one still has the curved rocker legs in place.

During the summer, the scene under the maple tree wears the green jacket of the summer grass, bright and lively. My father-in-law used to sit in some of the chairs on his front porch enjoying the summer breeze.

The chairs now mostly wait for a bird to perch on the wood of their backs, or for the sun to warm the old, aging wooden slats. When it rains, the drops of water wet them. When it snows, the flakes chill them.

In the autumn, the old rockers sit in the same spaces, but they take on the magic of the autumn season when the late afternoon sun floods the scene with a blanket of reddish gold color. The scene is complemented by the green grass of summer suddenly smothered by the colorful falling leaves.

The leaves overhead have shaded the chairs during the heat of the summer. Now, the ragged edges of the leaves show the wear of doing their summer work. The winds have broken some of the leaves in half before slamming them to the ground.

There are many things provided for us to photograph in our lives. The rivers, streams, mountains, the sea, flowers and trees, and on and on. As photographers, with cameras of all sorts or smartphones, we pick and choose the things in life that are important to us to photograph. Using our own eyes, we choose and reject the subjects of our photos. The subjects are there for all to see, but we as creative individuals make our final selection of what direction to lift and point our cameras. Many of our selections are of subjects with little worldly importance, like the old rocking chairs in my yard.

There is beauty for us everywhere, even in our front yards, under the maples. Use your creativity and exercise your brains for the spiritual enrichment in your lives. Camera or not, use your eyes to capture that image in your brain’s library of memory.