deep focus

I took this pic last week when the kids and I were hiking through the swamp. By the way, yesterday was the official, ceremonial designation of the swamp as a National Park.
The kids were running ahead of me all day long. They'd get out of sight and then wait for me to catch up on the trail before taking off again. Once, I was watching them up in the distance and as they turned around a bend in the path, my eyes focussed on the kids, through the scene in the picture. As soon as my attention was drawn to the beautiful out-of-focus scene, of course, I focussed on it and the scene was no longer what it had been. But in that split second of confused brain and eye muscles, I saw the drab pine tree clearly, completely surrounded by floating colors and shapes. When my brain had made sense of the vision, I figured I'd better try to re-create it with a photo. I don't know how well it was done, because now my memory is affected by the picture itself.
It would be quite easy to focus on a specific object and let a shallow depth of field blur everything else. But in this case, the entire scene was the surface of a swampy stand of water. The tree I'd seen so clearly, was reflected in the water, and the blurred colors and shapes were leaves, blossoms, and air bubbles lying on the surface. The whole thing was the same distance from my eyes. The depth was artificial, an eye trick.
I thought about those three dimensional eye tricks that someone made a mint on in the hallways of shopping malls. "focus on your reflection in the glass and the mystery will appear to you." I thought about how much more a DVD can contain because of multi-layered focus. I thought about sitting on the back deck staring up. Focus on the tree tops, on the wispy clouds, the moon, past the moon to the stars, through the stars to the... deeper focus. Through matter and substance and wave and particle to spirit. I've practically worn out my infrared focussing deeper, and where did I find it? In the air around me. Not past the stars, moon, clouds, trees, but right here.
So now you know. Don't have to bother. No, I'm convinced that you've got to do all that focussing to feel what is in you and all around you. You may have to focus that hard to realize that though it is all around you, it isn't in you. With proper focus, that can be fixed.