No matter how I tried, the damaged camera would not focus on the tiny pyramid… which was a shame, because its structure was incredible. It is nothing unusual, just a crystal of sea-salt, but the precision with which it was formed for some reason struck me as mind-blowing.

It is a thing of beauty. Each line and angle ordered after some complex design we can only observe, not decipher. Billions of trillions of these amazing structures are formed  and consumed… and we barely notice them.

The cat, incurably curious, came to see what I was doing and I marvelled at her design… absolutely lithe and flexible, able to move in ways we would find impossible. I played with her, watching how she uses that litheness to become a dead weight. Cats are not heavy… yet she can chase and fight a piece of string whilst laying on the floor, utterly relaxed and therefore difficult to move. Her very relaxation acts in a way that seems to make deliberate use of gravity to enhance her skills.

Once you start looking, you cannot help but notice…and it doesn’t matter if it is an eagle or an earthworm… that the design of every living thing, every element of nature, is magnificent… including our own.

To try to photograph the salt crystal, I placed it on the black surface of the table in which the leaves of a plant were reflected. I remembered studying plants at school and seeing their incredible structure under the microscope, learning how the parts of the plant worked together to turn sunlight into the fuel for growth through photosynthesis. I remember being amazed even then at the perfection of the design. Even more so when we learned how plant and animal life seemed designed to work together in perfect harmony… the vegetation breathing out what we need to breathe in and vice versa.

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