Experiencing things is often good and refreshing. However, too many of us habitually cling to experience. Experience manifests as the “experience” and the “experiencer.” That separation creates and invites conflict and limitation. Experiencing almost inevitably invites recognition. To recognize a particular experience, one has to have and use prior knowledge about the fundamental parameters and attributes of that experience. So, experience usually involves the past. Stored, old thought processes are involved in experience… even if the experience seems new.
We jump from one experience to another. Like the donkey chasing after the carrot dangling from a pole that is secured to the donkey, we run after experience. The “experiencer” is the experience. We need not, contrary to what we were taught, perpetually chase after experience. A sagacious mind often is not what endlessly pursues experience. It, like a dog that sees the futility of chasing its own tail, does not endlessly chase after “one experience after another.” Real, dynamic meditation, is not another calculated experience. When it occurs, without effort, it is not merely what gropes and reaches for more experience. (And to avoid experience is another way in which the mind can easily get lost and distorted.) Real poise and balance require a mind that is truly attentive, sane, dynamic, alive, and untethered. Most people — having been raised in (and educated by) a mediocre society — don’t want to delve into this or bother.
Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog 
When I am fully immersed in ‘experience’ now is all there is – any thinking etc comes later.
That’s great, Sara… like when walking in Nature. The staleness of thinking is in abeyance, and one can view Life without the dead symbols, thank goodness.
Yes, nature keeps me present – as for the rest? Oh
It’s so great that you are so close to nature, Sara. Most modern people are rather divorced from nature (for the most part). The Native Americans were (and still are) often very close to Nature. But then the iron-axe-wielding-tree-cutters came and took away their lands, butchered families, and propagandized their children. Now, so many have lost touch with nature.
it’ s my sanity Tom – I could not survive without this connection
Wow amazing macro! So beautiful and exotic flower!
Thank you, Marcela! Keep snappin’!
That’s a beautiful flower Tom – you outdid yourself!
Look closely and you will see a little insect in it, Linda. That flower, to that insect, is much of the world.
Like i mentioned in your blog, please be careful when walking around lakes, ponds, or streams, and such. Be sure to wear great sunglasses, because that water can easily reflect very harmful rays. Fortunately, in Michigan, you don’t have to worry too much about alligators pulling you in.
There is something very interesting in this. Experience is incredibly useful, but it can also become a filter through which we see everything that follows. Perhaps the real challenge is not to abandon experience, but to remain curious enough to look at the next experience without assuming we already know what we are going to see.