A pair of meadowlarks are nesting just above my office window, and the male, with his yellow chest, walks the ridge of the roof and offers melodic riffs. As I trot back to the house from checking on piglets, his gurgling trill tumbles down. The liquid notes are bliss; my senses tingle.
In the greenhouse, a bee clambers on a clover blossom, dragging the flower over in its rush to collect the pollen. The bee issues short blasts: Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Then it’s off, leaping to the arnica (just a hover, not worth stopping), the chamomile (two nudges and a bzzzt), and then the motherwort with its lavender spikes – Bzzzt. Bzzt-bzzt. Bzzzzt. B-B-Bzzzzzzt.
The geese are on promenade, making their way around the yard fence and wood pile for a visit to the irrigation ditch. After their ritual bill dipping and chorus of goose exclamations, they turn and begin the long saunter back. But an Embden goose holds back for a snack. The grass in the shade of the wood pile is appealing – just a few snips. Eventually, she looks up to discover…no geese! Alarm! Where, oh where might her companions be? She calls, bereft, then screeches, panicked. Her flock answers from across the way, a cacophony of honking. She shimmies through the fence, losing feathers, but reunited.
The wind dies down, evening settles at the Patch. The sun drops over the Bull Mountains, leaving a glowing rim along the high horizon. Stars are just the palest hints, but the sliver of a moon shines out, a silver snip, suspended. Pause. Peace in the gloaming.
Why does this all feel so good, satisfaction so thick that I can taste and smell it? Watching animals, plants, and weather delivers a holism, a sense of place, even with the concomitant work, the care and feeding and weeding and crazy, destructive wind.
Humans can focus on all manner of activities and emotions. But all attention is not the same. The texture of our mindfulness – its propensity to spur creative thought or simply to assist in productivity – is dependent on that which we consider. In the more-than-human world there is a reciprocity, and participants can be both observer and observed. I am in relationship with the meadowlark and he with me; neither of us fully excisable from the other.
Participating in the grand rush of life – even when surprised by grasshopper hordes, a piglet that doesn’t make it, or a bush that the dogs chew to the ground – delivers a tempered joy, an inescapable, suffusing silliness. I am present to the world with a particular kind of attention, an aliveness that is open and receptive.
In contrast, I experience a run to the grocery store as a sensory assault, with billboards demanding to be read, store signage hawking deals, and product packaging that screams buy, buy, buy on every surface. The digital world is similarly pummeling, with its inundation of solicitations, scams, and updates that leave me spent and sour. In this reality, I exist as a two-dimensional purchaser, assumed to be the flattened sum of my drive for financial survival and need for recreational consumption. As sociologist Allan Johnson phrased it, “the psychological profit motive doesn’t originate with us. We aren’t born with it. It doesn’t exist in many cultures and was unknown for most of human history.”[1] As creatures that thrive in connectedness, an economy based solely on monetary exchange erases great swathes of human experience and meaning.
I don’t often consider the texture of my attention, but perhaps I should. The forces of capitalism happen to be obsessed with that part of my persona. Our attention has become the latest resource to be mined, a landscape to exploit and colonize. Consumptive culture attempts to grasp ever more of us, to monetize every bit of what D. Graham Burnett, a scholar of attention, calls “this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves.”[2] The essence of us, our attention, can be harvested, and corporate forces successful at pulling us in reap the monetary rewards of advertising dollars.
In a way, I am my attention. My being is made up of that which I focus on. Reflecting on that truth sets me back a bit, as my days are often spent negotiating demands on my attention. I’ve even chosen charming little dings and chimes to signify the different kinds of interruptions, to anticipate the nature of the attacks upon my focus.
This is no anti-technology screed, as we all exist within a consumptive world, much of it digital, and entering that zone is an unavoidable aspect of contemporary American life. “Opt out” is simply not an option. But failing to name the violence to our senses and our selves can leave us silently acquiescing to the barrage of claims on our attention. We scramble, isolated and inundated, as we attempt to manage the bombardment that splinters our capacity for restoration, creativity, and relationship.
In a culture that “has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about,” we are left unmoored, awash in a sea of distraction and interruption.[3] As we face an escalating climate crisis, as the challenges to human, animal, insect, and plant life add up, I want to see those needs. But I struggle to remain present to this End of Days with my whole, focused self.
Sadly, I have no grand strategy or plan for success; I have yet to craft a counterattack or even a reasonable defense. To suggest that we bring awareness to the bold assaults on our most precious resource – our collective attention – is a paltry gesture, but the preciousness of all the life around me requires that I resist in some fashion. At a minimum, I can call out the sensory strafing, I can identify the invasions of my consciousness. And I can listen more fully…to the meadowlark, to the bee, to the geese, and to the stars.
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[1] Allan Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Temple University Press, 1997, p. 35.
[2] D. Graham Burnett, The Ezra Klein Show, “Your Mind is Being Fracked, May 31, 2024.
[3] Ibid.
I recommend 12 Theses on Attention (Princeton University Press, 2022) for further fodder on the topic of attention.
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