Poetry, Photography & the Art of Paying Attention

Years ago, I came across a grounding prompt that was almost offensively simple:

Close your eyes and feel your feet on the ground.

My world came to a screeching halt.

I had feet?!

I could feel them?

What a wild notion.

Apparently, I had spent years—perhaps my entire life—living somewhere directly behind my eyeballs. That endless voice of narration, for better or worse, had been driving the whole show. Thinking, analyzing, remembering, anticipating. On and on it went.

It was complete news to me that I could simply… feel my feet.

And I think that may have been my first real lesson in paying attention.

Not thinking about something.

Not naming it.

Not deciding what it meant.

Just noticing it.

Learning to Notice

Since then, I have tried to practice attention by as many means as possible.

Meditation.

Listening.

Walking without needing to arrive anywhere.

Putting my phone down.

And always, always watching.

Somewhere in all that watching, an entire world opened up.

It turns out there is an astonishing amount happening around us when we are not busy narrating over it.

Light, especially, has my attention.

The way it catches a drop of water. The way it scatters across a river at sunset. The way it appears for half a second in someone's eye and changes their entire face.

These things stop me in my tracks.

There are millions of tiny moments like this every day—micro-moments of beauty that ask for almost nothing from us except that we actually be there to see them.

Photography Is an Excuse to Look

As a photographer, attention is part of the job.

But I suspect photography has also become one of the ways I learned how to live.

A camera gives me permission to stare.

To notice the slant of someone's hand, the movement of fabric, a shadow crossing a wall, the expression that happens immediately after the posed expression.

The photograph I am looking for is rarely the most obvious moment.

It is usually the moment beside it.

The one that would have disappeared if no one had been paying attention.

That is what I love most about photography: it makes the fleeting visible.

Poetry Asks Me to Notice Something Else

Poetry does much the same thing, only inward.

If photography asks me to pay attention to what I can see, poetry asks me to pay attention to what I can feel.

A thought that keeps returning.

A question I cannot quite answer.

The strange mixture of joy and grief inside the same experience.

The almost-impossible task of finding language for something we know deeply but have never said aloud.

This is much of what shaped my poetry collection, Bliss Born of Pain.

Writing those poems taught me to linger with experiences I might otherwise have rushed to explain or move beyond. Poetry asked me to stay curious a little longer.

Photography and poetry may look like two different creative practices, but to me they are expressions of the same impulse:

Look closer.

There is something here.

Beauty as a Way of Life

Beauty, for me, is not simply an aesthetic preference.

It is a way of moving through the world.

Something to be sought in a touch, a meal, a conversation, a walk, the landscape outside my window.

I have built both my photography and my writing around it because beauty is one of the forces that continually returns me to my own life.

And the more closely I pay attention, the less rare beauty seems to be.

It is everywhere.

Not always spectacular.

Not always polished.

Often so ordinary that we have trained ourselves not to see it.

A glass of water catching the afternoon sun.

Someone you love laughing from another room.

Bare feet against cold ground.

Perhaps wonder is not something we have to travel very far to find.

Perhaps it is simply what happens when we become interested enough in our own lives to notice them.

And if paying attention—or finding beauty—feels like a new practice for you, I have one very sophisticated recommendation:

Start at the bottom.

Close your eyes.

And feel your feet.