Field of Purple Bonnets

If you’ve spent any time in Texas in spring, you know the bluebonnets. Now imagine a pair of glasses that shows you what you had been missing — every ultraviolet the flower had been wearing all along, a field suddenly purple, a world you had been standing inside without seeing.
That is love, for Richard Smith. That is Zin.

Richard has spent his life making himself small. He writes poetry in secret. With Zin, he learns to see. He builds a technology that puts a kind of sight once reserved for the powerful into ordinary hands. The powerful notice.

A parable about what happens when the tools that expand us also learn to watch us. About love as a form of sight, and surveillance as its opposite. About the quiet, expensive moment a man stops recognizing the woman who taught him to see — and a country stops recognizing itself.

A love story about being seen versus being watched — and the cost of confusing the two.

Dave is a technologist who has spent two decades building systems and a lifetime writing poetry in secret. He knows what it is to live at the margins of the worlds he helps create — to code by day, write by night, to enter rooms that ask him to leave parts of himself at the door. He writes about love as a discipline of attention — the work of seeing someone completely, and what happens when we stop. The Field of Purple Bonnets, the first in a series, asks what it costs to love in a world learning to watch instead of see.

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