Paying attention & noticing
Time travel on the wings of the blue heron in search of the richness of particulars
They say bird-watching creeps up on you as you get older.
Maybe that’s true. But maybe bird-noticing has always been there for me…
I remember growing up in northern Germany, we would spend a lot of time looking for and observing the White Storks. The area I grew up in was a breeding ground for this species, and with a focus on conservation and reintroduction programs at the time, we took many class trips to observe them and learn about their mating habits and migration patterns. I clearly remember finding them perched in their majestic nests on top of the traditional straw roof homes in the small villages nearby.
Then, having just moved to Tennessee in my early 20s, I remember first noticing, really noticing, the graceful flight of the great blue heron.
One typically humid, hot summer day, we were canoeing with some friends down a lush and green river near Nashville. The waters were calm, but the inevitability of a sudden hot summer thunderstorm was lingering in the air. Out on the banks, far down the river, we noticed the quiet presence of a heron. As we got nearer, calmly and gently, he pushed off and sailed through the air, cutting it with a surgeon’s precision. Always staying within sight, as we navigated the winding, curvy bends of the river. Just as we were falling behind, he would pause and stand on the shore, just standing there, as if waiting for us. Noticing his presence throughout the journey was the thread that held that memory together for me for many years. It created this beautiful, poetic container around a beautiful early memory of a new phase for me.
But the experience of noticing the heron stuck with me far beyond that. The calm, mystical presence of the bird is still gliding through my inner world. So much so that one of my last tattoos was inspired by that experience, as if the blue heron from that canoe trip had been waiting to burst from my inner world, through my skin to will itself into yet another visual reminder for me.
Fast forward to the present. I work from my home office most of the time and look out at a beautiful tree in our front yard. One day, spacing off and staring off into the distance between active work moments, I noticed a lot of local birds passing by. So I decided to get a small bird feeder for the tree. Now, when my eyes unfocus as the mind seeks a moment of respite from the constant stream of inputs, I notice the birds. I notice their movement, their interactions, their patterns, and their beauty. And I take a deep breath.
Looking closely connects little me to the big infinite
Noticing is the connecting threat between the stillness of my inner reflections and the fullness of the world around me. It’s both gifting attention and using attention to make sense of the details. Noticing is our secret power to stop time for a glimpse of the singular present, to be in the now.
In “Looking closely is everything,” Craig Mod also threads the power of focused attention, of noticing, of looking closely with its “implicit timelessness—a little dose of time travel.”
To look closely you must be present. And the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time. Similarly: During a seasoned meditation session — because you aren’t focused on how much time has passed or how much is left, because you’re observing, say, breath with a kind of total equanimity and stillness — time simply evaporates, as if in a dream.
And this poem from the beautiful collection An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days reminds us that attention makes the present beautiful.
The choice to meet her halfway…
The most powerful reminder on the power of noticing as a way for us to enter into the mystery of the presence of the heron comes from Jarod Anderson in Something in the Woods Loves You (via The marginalian). He writes:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
And he goes on to explore our intertwined relationship with the unknown that we enter into by paying attention. And reminds us of our meaning-making responsibilities in all of it:
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
For Now,
Noticing the perfect slowness of the heron
P.S. I have a hard time separating the “personal me” and the “professional me,” and to be honest, they have grown so intertwined that I have stopped trying.
“Personal and professional wires don’t just get crossed, they grow intertwined.” (Clara Syme/Owen Nichols of a83 via Dwell)
With that, I have written a sister article on noticing and what we can learn from public space design for better community gatherings over at the PPS Dispatch. So that post is connected to this one by a sibling-like bond, yet each has a different lens and different role to play in this exploration…