The Best Filter That Helps Us See Better

Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring is one of my favorite places in the park. Its beauty astounds me. There is always steam rising as the temperature in the middle stays fairly close to 160 degrees.

The colors are the result of pigmented bacteria in mineral rich water. As the temperature cools towards the outer edge, different bacteria can survive, thus the different colors in specific locations.

During our visit, the sun was incredibly bright, shining in an almost cloudless sky. The rising steam was thick, and the haze and glare made it hard to capture the colors in my photographs.

Everything looked washed out.

Then I added a filter to my lens and the colors fairly exploded.

This polarizing filter eliminated the glare and helped me to get a truer, more accurate representation of the hot spring.

Every time I see this picture, I think of trying to capture reality through the haze and the mist and how difficult it was. I am incredibly grateful for a small finely crafted piece of glass that enabled me to see without distortion. In photography, there are several types of filters that will each give differing results.

Life is much the same.

If we see through the filter of anger, we will find it hard to capture peace.

The filter of jealousy will make it difficult to experience gratitude and being unforgiving will invade our ability to trust. Selfishness will often leave us lonely, and vanity will keep us always wanting more.

The filter that will give us the truest and most reliable representation of how things really are, including ourselves, is the one labeled Love.

We are then not shrouded in the mists and the glaring cry of the world toward anger and division that pulls us away from the simple plea to love our neighbor.

When we see through this best of all filters, we are able to see more clearly the road to becoming our best self.

We see Truth. We see Light.

We see all the differing and incredible colors of Love.