Alexa Mergen's Blog - Posts Tagged "attention"
Beauty & Attention
"Seeing something beautiful always made me feel good."
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
Affection & Attention
My first published poem was "Farmer's Market" in a college journal called Portfolio in the 1980s. The poem notices market patrons, the "neighbors we have never met and only saw on Saturdays."
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
Hobbies & Attention
"A hobby is something that gives but doesn't take." -Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist.
Lose yourself in a hobby. If it's not diverting--whether gardening, knitting, running, baking, watching birds--it's not a hobby. A hobby, like a hobby horse, won't take you out the door; it brings you home to yourself.
When I glue bits of paper snipped from junk mail and magazines into journal covers and postcards, I'm so absorbed that I don't think to stop until a twinge in my shoulder plunks me back to my stiffened body. I slip the collages between layers of waxed paper to dry.
When I uncover them a day or two later, I am surprised at what I find, experiencing the same jolt of pleasure as I do when coming across a possible line for a poem in an old journal. But writing is what I do for others; collaging is what I do for me. When I send out a collage postcard, I don't worry about it getting chewed up in the postal service's sorting machine. The ephemeral aspect of the craft frees me from expectation. I can attend to the process of making without becoming attached to the end result and its reception.
A woman from Palm Springs pronounced years ago that writing poems was a hobby for me. I was young and full of self-doubt and her statement made me waver. It took me more than a decade, and the notions of readers, to decide that she was wrong.
Writing poems is enjoyable, surely, but not care-free. Both writing and collaging remove me from the measurements of clock time. But there's an urgency to the writing that the collaging lacks. Each activity requires full attention: the vocation of writing (poems, essays, stories) moves me toward a place that becomes clearer; the hobby of collaging allows me to loiter.
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Lose yourself in a hobby. If it's not diverting--whether gardening, knitting, running, baking, watching birds--it's not a hobby. A hobby, like a hobby horse, won't take you out the door; it brings you home to yourself.
When I glue bits of paper snipped from junk mail and magazines into journal covers and postcards, I'm so absorbed that I don't think to stop until a twinge in my shoulder plunks me back to my stiffened body. I slip the collages between layers of waxed paper to dry.
When I uncover them a day or two later, I am surprised at what I find, experiencing the same jolt of pleasure as I do when coming across a possible line for a poem in an old journal. But writing is what I do for others; collaging is what I do for me. When I send out a collage postcard, I don't worry about it getting chewed up in the postal service's sorting machine. The ephemeral aspect of the craft frees me from expectation. I can attend to the process of making without becoming attached to the end result and its reception.
A woman from Palm Springs pronounced years ago that writing poems was a hobby for me. I was young and full of self-doubt and her statement made me waver. It took me more than a decade, and the notions of readers, to decide that she was wrong.
Writing poems is enjoyable, surely, but not care-free. Both writing and collaging remove me from the measurements of clock time. But there's an urgency to the writing that the collaging lacks. Each activity requires full attention: the vocation of writing (poems, essays, stories) moves me toward a place that becomes clearer; the hobby of collaging allows me to loiter.
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
