In the book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, author Jenny Odell suggests a thought exercise disguised as an art project, which coincidentally, is particularly relevant to the drought that much of the country is in right now, including Minnesota. She suggests putting a small jar outside where you live in order to collect a bit of rainwater next time it rains. Then use that rain water with watercolor paints, cheap from the drugstore, to paint a picture and hang it somewhere you can see it. Or even just sit the filled jar on a windowsill. Odell explains that the reason for this recommendation—apart from the fact that it just may be fun—is to call one's attention to the fact that the rain that falls in our backyards comes from water sources far away from where we live. Water for rain can travel for many miles in "atmospheric rivers." The atmospheric river known as "The Pineapple Express," for example, carries water from the tropics to Western California. I had no idea. Around here, we've had very little rain for the last three months, but a half inch may fall in the next 24 hours. I'm going to put out a little jar and paint a picture from what comes.
(Odell's book, by the way, is about a broader topic than where our rain comes from, and I recommend it. She challenges readers to consider how social media and other media channels can so thoroughly capture our attention, thereby preventing us from directing our attention to those matters to which we want and need to give our attention. The above project is fun and thought-provoking, but the core of the book is here.)
Mary Peelen and Quantum Heresies: On The Eating of a Pear
Back in March I listened to Zoom episodes of the Madeleine L’Engle Seminar “Poetry, Science and the Imagination,” produced by Image and hosted by Brian Volck, every Wednesday over the lunch hour. All five episodes were wonderful, but I was particularly intrigued with Mary Peelen. A science-minded writer, although not a scientist, Peelen has written a book of poems called Quantum Heresies, which I ordered soon after the episode. Her poems are loaded with reflections on chaos theory, parabolic arcs, chromosomes, supernovas, gravity, algebraic variables, and a myriad of other images that become metaphors for life.
In the poem titled “One,” she writes of a pear. An ordinary pear.
When I come to you
offering one small green pear,
I’m asking you to believe in
every green there is,
at every hour.
The whole tree.
This past year we’ve been eating a lot of pears and until reading this poem I never once thought about the trees from which they came. Do I even know what a pear tree looks like? In what town did the trees grow? What state? What did the field of pear trees look like? Each pear existed and grew on a specific branch on a specific whole tree in a specific location under a specific square of sky and was picked by a specific set of human hands belonging to a specific person and packed into a specific box before being loaded onto a specific truck and on and on before it finally arrived at my house and was bitten into by me.
The thought exercise may seem inconsequential, but it does open up a point of wonder, a point of connection to a world beyond my appetite, my refrigerator, my grocery store. Multiply this exercise by all the different things you eat during the day—an egg, an onion, a steak perhaps—and the world rapidly expands yet keeps one in a web of provision.
Two small green pears are now sitting on my kitchen counter. While waiting for them to soften a bit before eating, I’m wondering where they’ve been.
~~~
[Photo: “Three Pears” by Paul Cézanne; copyright free via the National Gallery of Art]
Tiers of Attention
Another book I've been reading is RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (2009). Gallagher writes to turn our attention toward things that matter, because the things that matter most may not be what gets our attention first. She gives the example of going bird watching and becoming so enamored with the brilliant cardinals that quickly come into view that you tend to not see the more elusive or less colorful birds. This is exactly the scenario in my backyard. I look out the window, and, Oh look, there's a beautiful cardinal! And there's another! The cardinals tie a tether around my attention, and I never look for most of the other species of birds that are circling my yard just beyond the cardinals. Seeing the cardinals is an example of what Gallagher calls “bottom-up” attention, in which you go for the lowest hanging fruit and stop there. The problem with that approach is that there is so much more to see and learn and think about. Let’s aim instead for the “top-down” approach, urges Gallagher, and choose our focus with intention.
I’ve been watching my yard more carefully the last few days. What of the small birds that rustle the lilac bushes or that seem to shoot straight up through the blue spruce? What birds go with what song? I hear a multitude of melodies. Blue jays are another bird easy to see although they aren’t as common as cardinals. Yesterday, a blue joy slammed into my living room window, right in front of me, and bounced off as if to jealously warn me not to get too carried away aiming for sightings of birds of a more subtle variety.
Of course Gallagher’s goal is not to warn us about thinking too narrowly about birds but rather to consider carefully the thoughts that we too easily allow to capture and predominate our thinking. Given all that's gone on this past year, in the world, our nation, our cities, our personal lives, it's definitely been a year in which our attention has been grabbed and often by the bottom-up news, messages, and fears. The cardinal flits, the blue jay slams, the statistics flash, the sound byte lands and our attention is no longer our own. Pull it back, own it, I tell myself.
Gallagher writes, “Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depend on how you handle it.”
~~~
[Photo: Tulips seen on a morning walk. A house further down the block had much flashier tulips set in a large garden. I almost took a picture of those tulips. But then I saw these, tulips of a more humble variety, hugging the street.]
Leslie Jamison on Grace
The most recent issue of The Mockingbird ("The Surprise Issue") includes an interview with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn. The topic here is grace, the grace we share with each other:
We can offer things—do offer things—to other people without any kind of pure heart: grudgingly, resentfully, with white knuckles or clenched guts, and it can still be deeply meaningful. It can still "count." Even that notion of "counting" is a delusion I've long subscribed to and am sort of interested in pushing back against, or playing tag with, or sitting down and having a cup of tea and a long chat with.... I'm trying to get away from frameworks of grace that rely on sufficiency, and to lean into notions of pleasant ambush, desire, and care—the primal ways we are moved to want, and to give, the ways that our not knowing or controlling our destinies ultimately gives those destinies more spacious horizons.
Try This On: We Are Not the Cloud, We Are the Sky
In Finding Livelihood, I quoted a couple sentences from Willa Cather's Death of the Archbishop about the sky above Santa Fe: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”
I thought of Cather's words recently and the glory and beauty that is the sky when reading a new book by Richard Carter, The City Is My Monastery: A Contemporary Rule of Life. In his book, using both poetry and short essay, Carter writes about ways of being with God and with others in community: with silence, with service, with scripture, with sacrament, with sharing, with Sabbath, and staying with.
A section that Carter wrote about the sky keeps resonating with me and—in a strange way, given that it's about the sky—is grounding. In his chapter on silence, here’s what he writes on page 22:
“Remember the image of clouds in the sky. The clouds come; the clouds pass; we are not the cloud; we are the sky. Sometimes the cloud feels so dark that it needs to shed its load. And so the cloud pours out its rain. This is like the grief within us that must be shed. The tears and sorrow dispersing the weight of the cloud. Remember we are not the cloud nor the rain. We hold this within; we let it go; the cloud dissolves; we are the sky.”
I love that. We are not the cloud; we are the sky.
~~~
[Photo: a late-afternoon late-winter sky]
A promise of strength
Reading recently in the New Testament, these words of Paul's shimmered for me: "He will also strengthen you to the end." (I Corinthians 1:8). Yes, please, to strengthening.
I looked up strengthen in my trusty hardcover Webster's New Dictionary for Synonyms—which still sits next to my desk decades after buying it used for $4.98 at Half-Price books—and found these synonyms for strengthen: invigorate, fortify, energize, reinforce. Yes, to all of that. God will strengthen, God will invigorate, God will fortify, energize, reinforce. Ever and always.
If each of us were to make a list of all that has zapped our reserve, our sense of strength, over the past year, I dare to assume that no list would be empty. In God's mercy, may all entries on such a list be converted to strength. May all entries come to eventually commingle generously with joy of the deep and abiding variety.
~~~
[Photo: very strong rock in northern Minnesota]
New Year's Intentions — 2021
I’ve posted this list of intentions a number of times over the years, although with slight edits each time. Here it is again for several reasons: because there are readers for whom this list has meaning, because this blog has new readers for whom this list might be of interest, and because I need to put it in front of myself once again as a reminder of a chosen way of being, particularly after this past year when even being was particularly hard. “Intention,” rather than “resolution,” is a good word to use in this setting because it implies something to work toward, move toward, rather than something at which you either succeed or fail. This isn’t about succeeding or failing.
Here's the list:
Experiment more.
Create more; consume less.
Trust more; worry less.
Read more; write more; watch less.
Write more of what lasts longer.
Waste less time.
Spend more time in "creative idleness."
Spend less; save more.
Pray more, including for the people who read the words I write.
Use more paper, lots of paper.
Use a pen more, a keyboard less.
Love more.
Talk less but say more.
Figure out how patience and urgency co-exist.
Hope always.
Cook more; eat less.
Play the piano more.
Pursue truth, beauty, and goodness at every opportunity; realize every moment is an opportunity.
Stand up straighter.
Speak more often in the strength of my own voice.
Find the way to do what needs to be done; sit quietly and wait for the Lord.
Accept paradox.
Pray more, pray without ceasing.
Hope more absolutely.
Be more available to and vulnerable with God and others.
See the signs, ask for signs; be more willing to step into the unknown.
Use less; have less; give more away.
Shorten my to-do lists.
More intentionally be a conduit for the flow of God's grace to the world.
Be silent more often.
Pray more fervently for safety coast to coast but live less fearfully.
Remind myself as often as needed where true hope lies.
Start fewer projects but finish more of those I start.
Be encouraged.
Be excited.
Hope more purely.
Be more attuned to the burdens of the people I pass on the street as well as those
with whom I share a table or a home.
Pray for the world and its leaders.
Love God with ever more of my heart, soul, strength, and mind.
Thank more.
Eat less sugar but more dark chocolate.
Practice not worrying.
Embrace joy.
Seek joy.
Share joy.
I'd love to hear some of your intentions. If you want, you can share them in the comments below.
~~~
[Photo: taken of a most inviting scene I saw inside a planter pot.]