The wallpaper on my computer is a picture of the pool at a Japanese onsen, a bath house built around a natural hot spring. I’ve had this same picture set as my wallpaper through five or six different computers over the course of nearly twenty years at this point. So long that I’ve long ceased actually seeing it. I have no idea where in Japan the photograph was taken, who took it, or even where I first found it. It is has become, as the saying goes, just wallpaper.
Something prompted me recently to really look at this picture again. And, as is usually the case when you stop to really look at something that has been in your presence for years but you’ve stopped seeing, really looking at it again made me see things in it that I had never noticed before. In this case, how little information there is in the photograph for me to recognize it as having been taken in Japan.
The bottom half of the photo is mostly water. The top half is mostly rocks. There’s a building in the background that’s mostly concealed by trees, its main visible feature being a small window. On one of the rocks at the edge of the water sits a small wooden bucket.
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