An altered view

   Below is a picture that I took as I walked around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. About a week ago, we had a good rainstorm accompanied by strong winds here in San Francisco, and one of the large trees fell into the lake. It had stood next to the bench seen below.
   For some days the car path located just outside of the picture was cordoned off for what the people that walk here said was a crane to remove the trunk, but after a few days the fallen tree and cones remained.
   It's interesting to me that somehow the area had appeared relatively unchanged from how I'd known it for some years (even with the tree laying horizontally in the water), but today I noticed that something was different; it had finally been removed.
   Although I have passed this spot more than a thousand times, and seen here much more than just this specific tree, the visual absence of it made the area appear completely new. It really fascinated me that my perception could be so radically altered by the removal of just one thing, no matter the size, from my field of vision.
   I realized at that moment in a very visceral way that my eyes did not in fact translate empirical information, but rather helped to form the subjective beliefs that I use to determine what is true and not in the world. It was a powerful reminder that what I often determine to be irrevocably correct can conceivably be so to the contrary.