Nurture Noticing

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December 18, 2020

Where did I get this idea? The idea that things would play out as they do in my imagination. It's surprising, the mismatch between expectations and reality. The movie playing in my head that accompanies anticipation is one thing; reality is far different.

Life is formless, and it is particular. Each mountain, each lake, each river, each tree, each stone has its own existence. Each lives its own life.

Intersecting this moment, after innumerable eons of tumbling in the river, washed up to the shore, this small pillow of basalt shares its warmth in my hands.

Noticing make the difference. What is not noticed can't be loved. How can you live a good life if you don't notice what is actually happening in your life? The skill of noticing is an inherited trait and one that can be nurtured.

References

  • Van Dyke, John Charles. The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
  • Mary Oliver (2016): Upstream, Penguin Press

Other stuff I've written on this topic

This post is meant to help us renew our commitment to caring for the world and remind our future selves to be fractionally better than before. This post points to where I want to work on my mental fitness and 'adulting.'. It is a reminder to operate in the world with love and compassion and includes tips put together in moments of clarity to help when caught up in the world's uncontrollable chaos. Please, continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.

Inexplicable Depth

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Finding a moment when you have become fully present is a precious thing. Finding something that keeps bringing you back to these present experiences is golden. We've all had the experience of dropping into a zone where the internal commentary stops and focus becomes vivid. This happens when walking, exercising, reading, making or listening to music, practicing art, and creating haiku.

Haiku is a structured Japanese form of writing what looks like poems. These traditionally are three lines and follow a 5-7-5 syllable format.

> Haiku seizes the moment of inexplicable depth. They seek an expression out of time, beyond before and after. They look for the place where life deepens and suddenly the universe is present in the lighting of one candle. [^1]

Lighting one candle
With another candle;
An evening of spring.

Buson

---

Here I'll show how I developed a haiku. It starts with 2 subjects, breath and stars, and has the theme of movement. The stars are a distraction from the main topic, which is the movement of breath. I try to use "Look!" as a sleight of hand to startle the reader into a sudden shift in focus. The theme feels overstated, and a bit forced. The coming/going and here/there are redundant here. I could have used up/down, in/out, before/after. The breath and the stars got dropped, and the theme morphs into a presentation of randomness.

It ends unified with one subject, the butterfly. Everything in the haiku is about the butterfly and supports the presentation of randomness. It creates a picture of the butterfly without having to have a photograph.

Coming and going

v.1

Coming and going,
breath moves here and there.
LOOK! A shooting star.

v.2

This way and that way,
spring breezes blow here and there.
LOOK! A shooting star.

v.3

Butterfly
Flutters this way and that way.
without a sound.

v.4

Butterfly fluttering
here and there in the spring breeze,
without a sound.

v.5

Butterfly fluttering
in still air, here and there
without a sound.

v.6

Butterfly fluttering;
a drunkard weaving here and there
without a sound.

References

[^1]: Reginald Horace Blyth (1952): Haiku, Tōkyō: Hokuseido, p.116

Other stuff I've written on this topic

This post is meant to help us renew our commitment to caring for the world and remind our future selves to be fractionally better than before. This post points to where I want to work on my mental fitness and 'adulting.'. It is a reminder to operate in the world with love and compassion and includes tips put together in moments of clarity to help when caught up in the world's uncontrollable chaos. Please, continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.

Walking is thinking

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We move by walking. Sometimes we walk from place to place and have an agenda in mind. We walk to the refrigerator from the couch, we walk out to the mailbox to check to see is if there is any news from the world, we walk up and down the isles of the grocery store.

Sometimes we are more adventurous exploring the places of our dreams. We walk paths that are represented by lines on a map and if we are lucky, lose ourselves in the process.

Walks feed our genius, our heart, and nourishes our soul. How does walking clear the way for clearer thinking? Walking slows time down to match your pace. Time is slowed and ideas have a chance to meander testing idea connections until it finds the right dance partner to hook up with. When walking, your thinking is make more concrete, taming the fluttering swarm of drunken butterflies between your ears. Walking is like writing in that it is a form of thinking. 'Walking is thinking' in the same way as 'writing is thinking' for solidifying ideas.

With your leg muscles pumping, the breath flows in and out matching your pace, with the air caressing your skin, the warmth of the sun heating your face, the sights and sounds of your environment holding you in there embrace, through the activities of the body, walking gives form to thinking.

A hike can last a lifetime. A lifetime can be contained in a hike. A hike can start a life. A lifetime can be ended with a hike. We are on a metaphoric hike in this life. - Erling Kagge [^1]

A lifetime filled with walking is how I want to be remembered. When it's over, I hope I can say that I walked enough, smiled enough, laughed enough, and loved enough. If I could, I would forever remember this life by the walks I took.

References

  • [^1]: Erling Kagge (2018): Walking: one step at a time, Penguin Publishing Group

Other stuff I've written on this topic

This post is meant to help us renew our commitment to caring for the world and remind our future selves to be fractionally better than before. This post points to where I want to work on my mental fitness and ‘adulting.’. It is a reminder to operate in the world with love and compassion and includes tips put together in moments of clarity to help when caught up in the world’s uncontrollable chaos. Please, continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.

Iterate through failure

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Progress through practice is incremental. Learning, training, and maintaining proficiency is an iterative process heavily weighted in the early stages with many failures. The only way to get more skilled at something is to go through these failures and not be discouraged by them. Failure is not an obstruction to the development of skill. It is the guardian of success. Failing indicates you are on the map, in the terrain that leads to proficiency. In the beginning, how would you know if you were progressing if you didn't fail and fail again? Befriend failure. Embrace failure. Her hand is the hand that guides learning.

My dog, the mushroom farmer

Non-fiction flash writing practice.

"Zivon, Zivon, come here!"

Is it the corpse of a mouse, is it a fermented Italian Plum leftover from the fall harvest, is it deer shit or worse yet, coyote shit?

"Drop it! Drop it!"

He's hesitant. Not yet sure he wants to comply.

"Drop it!"

This is a command he is still trying to decide if he will follow or not. Mostly so far he mostly resists following if, but we're working on it.

No, it turns out Zivon spits out a clump of pine duff mixed with two perfectly fine-looking white mushrooms. He has been cultivating his mushroom crop again.

What the hell! There are five inches of snow on the ground, and he has his nose buried in it, apparently zeroed in on his private mushroom patch.

These fat white mushrooms are all over the place, in our lawn, next to the kennel, in our wood lot, and Zivon's favorite patch on the hillside next to the garage. On walks with Zivon in the wood lot, we've seen where the grasses and pine duff has been pawed away, exposing the stump of the remains of these mushrooms. The deer, rabbits, and coyotes just love them, and so does Zivon.

He's a proud amateur mycologist.

References

Ira Glass on the secret of success in creative work

This post is meant to help us renew our commitment to caring for the world and remind our future selves to be fractionally better than before. This post points to where I want to work on my mental fitness and ‘adulting.’. It is a reminder to operate in the world with love and compassion and includes tips put together in moments of clarity to help when caught up in the world’s uncontrollable chaos. Please, continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.

Attentional Autonomy

 
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I am here, sitting at my desk, in a wild body, curious about what is making this moment precious. I hear my voice; what are your trying to tell me? Are you telling me to pay attention and be a good person? Are you trying to encourage me to wake up to the wonderment of this bright moment?

Great Horned Owl pair have an intimate conversation. I pray for the Cottontail rabbits. "hu - hu - hu - hoo! - hoo!" He says. "hu - hu - hu - hoo! - hoo!" She replies.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

What we pay attention to makes us. Literally, what we pay attention to establishes or reinforces neural pathways in your brain. This changes the brain's circuitry, making it more likely that you'll pay attention to the same thing in the future. This neuroplasticity is inherent in your brain's architecture. It applies to what we pay attention to, and how you behave, what you think, what you read, the media and people you associate with, basically everything. These things either establish or reinforce neural pathways in your brain. Even reading this, you are shaping your brain. This is why it is so important to be careful about what you pay attention to.

  1. Attention care
  2. Don’t give your attention away too easily
  3. Positive Deviant

REFERENCES

  1. Writing The Scared Into The Real
  2. Attention Is the Beginning of Devotion
  3. The Wander Society Pocket Library

This post is meant to help us renew our commitment to caring for the world and remind our future selves to be fractionally better than before. This post points to where I want to work on my mental fitness and ‘adulting.’. It is a reminder to operate in the world with love and compassion and includes tips put together in moments of clarity to help when caught up in the world’s uncontrollable chaos. Please, continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.