Paying attention

Interesting idiom, "pay attention." Doesn't work literally. I don't think I have a bank of attention that I can draw from when things get confusing. Turns out that the "pay" doesn't mean hand over something, it more or less means to provide or offer. As this in Quora, "The word pay is from Middle English paien and is derived from the Latin pacare and the Old French paiier, meaning to appease."

I find that when I do pay attention in the idiomatic sense, I discover there is a lot more to the world around me than I realized. I remember years ago I was walking through a forest and heard a screaming up in a tree -- looked around and saw a raccoon with his head in a hole, either tormenting or being tormented by something in there. The point being had I not bothered to go for that walk, and look around me, to pay attention to the wild things, I never would have seen or heard that. But it must go on all the time, without me. Once I was sitting quietly by a small stream on a summer morning, when the water seemed to begin to boil -- a moment later a large snapping turtle surfaced. If I'd not invested part of my life in being there, I would never have seen such a thing.

Or recently I put a nightlight by a doorway in the basement, a door I often go through. But when I turned on the light and it shone directly up, it illuminated a nest of cobwebs I'd never noticed; no doubt there are lots more things lurking in that basement, life's relentless efforts to intrude into what we constantly strive to keep as an orderly life.

The first several years after we moved into this house, we essentially neglected our screened back porch and more or less relegated the backyard to occasional use. When I finally got around to restoring the porch, and put in bird feeders, the backyard became a thriving nest of nature, with squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, chickadees, bluejays, cardinals, finches, woodpeckers, and juncoes, with the rare hawk dropping in. All that was out there before, but because I didn't pay attention, I didn't see any of it.

Since I have been working with stones in my yard, I cannot walk past a bed of river rock without looking more closely at the individual rocks, and finding wondrous things -- patterns and colors that tell a history of times long past, lava flows and times of immense immeasurable heat and pressure, stories that may never otherwise be told.

It's a wide wild mysterious and wonderful world, if one simply bothers to appease the inner need to calmly observe.