Human attention is a curious, precious thing.
I am thinking of my own experience with attention. How, when gathered and sewn to an idea, or an image, or even just a fleeting moment that had some peculiar, enigmatic quality to it, doors then open, both in our inner and outer worlds, and we might walk into a labyrinth of resonances.
But in the writing of this, I’m reminded also of the impact of human attention–perception–upon quantum experiments, wherein the attention of the scientists changed the behavior of atomic particles.
So that even now, as my pen slides across the page, the labyrinth gate opens, and in we go.
Here is the first thing I was going to write about: kingfishers.
After I finished my owl piece, I felt a sort of creative emptiness, a lull. I have projects I could return to, but this lull demanded its own space. And then, driving along my road, I saw a neighbor I hadn’t seen in some time. I stopped to say hello. “If you ever paint a kingfisher, I’d buy that,” he said, adding, “Did you know they nest in the ground?”
Kingfishers. A bird with a particular quality of meaning for me. Here’s a poem I wrote that perhaps explains it best:
So I picked up that thread, and wove it into my attention.
Actually, in my everyday mind I thought I’d just whip out a quick kingfisher pastel. Not for a sale (humans are rarely moved by such extrinsic incentives), but to fill that pause. It made sense enough. But then the kingfishers started arriving. In my inbox, in stories, in the creek that slips past my studio.
Rattle, rattle, rattle, calls the kingfisher.
And then another thread arrived. I picked it up along the trail, literally.
There’s a path from my house that goes into the forest and up the ridge. I walk it most days, with my dogs. Sometimes on these walks, or other meanderings, something––perhaps a plant, a tree, or a stone––will grab my attention. It feels like a line tossed to me, and caught by my body. Like an etheric fishing line, or a harp string caught in a breeze. It shimmers and hums ever so softly. It’s subtle, to be sure, but with a little softening of the thinking mind, you can feel it.
The place along this trail must have some sort of magic, or it’s woven thick with threads; as this particular quality of attention has happened here frequently enough that I finally took notice. This place is a spiritual wellspring that breathes my creativity awake.
In the spring and summer it is swathed in blue cohosh, a medicinal plant, regarded as a uterine tonic, and when I walk the rocky path it does not miss my attention that my creativity, seated within my womb, is deeply nourished here. Now in autumn, she died back weeks ago, but her berries––the size and color of blueberries––caught my eye and left me with that peculiar feeling of being joined.
I know then to stop, or if I can’t, to promise to return. I’m not looking for meaning, or answers, or reasons. It’s more that my attention has joined me to this plant, and that joining makes a sound that leaves its imprint upon my body.
Rattle, rattle, rattle calls the kingfisher.
I take these threads and twist them together in a long cord of blue. I start to work on a kingfisher painting, in watercolor instead of pastel. There’s water everywhere. In the painting, in my prayers. And I’m not sure where it’s taking me, except forward, deeper into the labyrinth.
What I do know is that something is happening, and it’s not just inside of me. It’s not just on the paper. All these threads that connect me to the kingfisher, and the blue cohosh, to the veins in the mountain that run with water, to the great flow of the river herself––all these threads are woven and knotted to each other.
I am not separate from that which holds my attention. I twist and turn in the labyrinth. The kingfisher rattles in the sky, in the waters. The blue cohosh reminds me to hold some space open in my body. The lines hum and stretch. The surface startles open, for just a moment, and I glimpse a reality that extends far beyond my capacity to understand.
I hurl my threads into the waters, and on the other side, something holds the line. It shimmers and hums. Who knows, now, what might happen.
Rattle, rattle, rattle calls the kingfisher.