Ever since we started the Breathworks blog last year I've been struggling to find a 'style' and 'tone'. I want to blog, and share my life as someone who is trying to be mindful whilst dealing with a painful body, but I keep on putting it off and so the weeks go by.

Yesterday I met a photographer/activist here in Sydney - Sarah Barker - and she inspired me. It turned out we've both ditched flash cameras and just use our iphones for images these days. This is an approach I first learned from Lawrence Yusopoff who creates extraordinary images all on his iphone 4S. I find his images breath-taking.

I've had a long and deep love of photography - or 'writing with light' as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described it - and exhibited in galleries in NZ in my early twenties. But for decades I've been thwarted by the need to carry around camera equipment when my back and neck can no longer manage it. With the quality of camera on later version iphones - well, suddenly the world of photography has opened up to me again.

So I've decided to blog with images and see how I get on. I'd like to have a go at sharing with you moments in each day where the beauty of life breaks through the mundane and the functional, and allows me to stop and rest and wake up to what is right before me.

This morning I went out on to the back porch of where I am staying. It is a perfect Sydney day with a blue, blue sky and bright sunlight. I sat there and allowed myself to fall into the blueness of the sky. How can it be so blue? Then I shifted my gaze to the greens of the bushes that surrounded my gaze.

At first they looked very similar - I couldn't see them 'as if for the first time' as they were trapped in familiarity - just more bushes like all the other gazillions of bushes I've seen over the years. But as I looked more deeply the greens became infinitely varied and the textures of the plants broke up into all the different characters of spikey, soft, blossomy, silky, dry, moist. Through resting in the same perspective for a few moments the world erupted into textures, light and beauty.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I wrote a film script that distinguished between what I called 'looking' (the ordinary perspective that relates to the world from a functional and utilitarian perspective) and what I called 'seeing' (where one drops beneath the surface of things to rest in the wonder of each moment). Today I felt in touch with this shift in perspective which is, of course, what mindfulness is all about. 

Why don't you spend a few moments today 'just seeing' and allowing your mind and heart to drop beneath the chattering, describing, narrative mind, to rest in something much more broad, deep and quiet.

Vidyamala Burch