To see, to capture.

It hasn't been since playing countless rounds of the alphabet game on the drive up 95 as a child stuck in endless Connecticut somewhere between Q and X that I had to work so hard at looking as this week. We drove around our first game park in Tanzania and at first, every termite hill was an elephant and every wayward branch, a giraffe. I wasn't sure where to look, how to look, what were the signs that would tell me what was what.  And. I found myself seeing mostly trees, everyone of them seemed like the tree of knowledge- acacia, baobab; and every one, everything screamed, 'see me, make sense of me, capture me, meaning his here. ' And sometimes all I could really see were other people's elbows supporting lens more expensive and skilled than my own. What was I looking for? Was it okay to use only my eyes? What if I didn't capture it well enough for later,  how could I make this moment a memory? Blink harder? Think deeper? Connect more fully? And then we did see a crooked branch become a herd of giraffe listlessly and gracefully galavanting in the open plain.  And then an elephant appeared in the middle of the road and became one of at least 13, they played together and grazed and blinked their long, long lashes and that seemed enough for them.  We drove off, looking for more.