11.3.2024 Dear Anna,

Dear Anna,

I just reread your excellent blog post about attention. It couldn’t have come at a better time. The intersection of my personal life chugging along in stereotypically modern, chaotic fashion with the larger anxieties surrounding the upcoming elections is coalescing into a perfect storm of sorts—one that has me wanting to do literally anything except intentionally focus my attention.

It is humbling how much the structure of modern life in this country siphons and distracts our attention. I want to devote myself to reclaiming the gift of my attention and intentionally placing it where it can nourish me and nourish others. Instead, I allow myself to be swept up in the minutiae of endless commitments and to do lists, and I cling to my favorite distractions like little momentary life rafts to avoid the ocean of dread I’m dog-paddling to stay afloat on.

The grief embedded in that ocean is profound, and I will do practically anything to avoid truly feeling it, to allow it to fully enter my mind and my body and to be consumed by its enormity. There is a part of me that fears that I won’t make it out alive if I dive in. This is also the truest description of the United States of America that I can think of.

The anxiety in the air is palpable. On the one hand, what semblance of democracy we currently have hangs in the balance. On the other, business as usual is marching steadily forward, sucking up every possible drop of oil and pumping it into the atmosphere. Sucking up every bit of wealth—natural, cultural, financial—and pumping it into the pockets of a few obscenely rich individuals who continue to grow richer by the second as late-stage industrial capitalism hurtles toward its inevitable, devastating conclusion. No matter which candidate wins the presidency, my tax money will still be used to fund genocide in Palestine, to stockpile an exponentially-expanding arsenal of weapons doled out around the planet to feed the insatiable bellies of those billionaires in the name of keeping us white folks in a comfortable delusion of supremacy. The system is working as intended.

We in Idaho are preparing to watch our neighbors voluntarily (re)elect a person who has stated that the democratic process is rigged if he loses, but not if he wins. We will watch ourselves elect local leaders who have taken away our bodily autonomy, our books, and our public education in the name of freedom. The part I’m dreading most is watching us vote down a citizen-led ballot initiative that hoped to put the tiniest of guard rails on runaway power consolidation in the hands of an increasingly unstable and radical fringe of people. I have not done enough to stop this from happening. There is never enough that I could do that would actually stop it all from happening. But that’s for another discussion.  

Yesterday, I went outside with your prompt to choose a being and gift my attention to them for five minutes. It’s not that I haven’t been getting outside—I’ve been taking plenty of walks, doing fall garden chores, winnowing my seeds for the Co-op, and soaking up any fleeting moments of sun before the winter descends. But on my walks, I’m so in my head that I’ll go for 10 minutes or more without actually noticing a single thing around me. Then, out of nowhere, a particularly brilliant tree ablaze in fall foliage will arrest my attention and snap me back into the physical world for a moment before I retreat into my own ruminations again. Flickering around the edges of my consciousness in the moments where the wind catches the leaves and sends them flying, leaving bare branches behind, is a sense of doom about the upcoming winter.

The darkness is devouring both ends of the day faster and faster each year it seems. Another dry winter is predicted for Idaho. I’m scared. And I definitely don’t feel like I should talk about that anywhere public. It’s such a non-productive emotion to feel. And nobody needs to be dragged down with that, right? It’s my job to be hopeful and inspiring and solutions-oriented.

I decided to spend my five deliberate minutes with an apple tree that takes up half of my wild front yard. I transplanted it there as a small seedling when I ripped out my front lawn as a proud new homeowner 17 years ago. Over the ensuing decades it has sprawled out between giant conifers that block most of the sun, making it stretch and reach with impossibly wispy branches that still manage to produce delicious apples amid the tangle of other plants.

I noticed the smell most of all. The fecundity of damp earth, decaying leaves, rotting fruit. The leaves are getting munched on by something—I hadn’t paid close enough attention to notice that before, even though I have been harvesting fruit.

I found a perfect puzzle piece of chewed off leaf lying face down on the leaf below it. I snuggled it back into its rightful place, seeing it whole again for a brief moment, and made myself a promise: I will pay closer attention to you, beautiful tree. Are these leaf chewers bothering you too much? What can I do to help you?

There is moss growing on the underside of one of the most northerly facing branches. Moss! I think I’ve marveled at that before, but it still seems like a new revelation. I can’t believe this spot I barely water is moist enough to support moss! Life can make so much with so little.

Only a few of the leaves have started to abscise, which seems really late in the season. I explored the base of the petiole where a leaf had let go from its branch, from the only home it’s ever known. It’s pink! Bright pink streaks at the very tip of a yellow leaf’s yellow petiole. How glorious! It’s like exquisite modern art, in miniature!

I also noticed some new, tiny leaves sprouting from the petioles of the leaves still attached. Which surprised me, and of course led me down a rabbithole of research. They’re called stipules, and they fall off earlier in the season on most plants that make them. Not all of this tree’s leaves have them, just the ones closer to the bottom. It makes me wonder if the tree made them in response to not having enough sun and wanting just a bit more opportunity to catch the light to photosynthesize and make food down there in the relative darkness. I love knowing that other noticers have long been studying something I’ve just barely come across.

And of course, there is the perennial comfort that comes from seeing next year’s buds, already perfectly formed on the soon-to-be bare branches, awaiting the coming spring. It’s like the tree is certain that the world isn’t going to end this winter, that the light will return and the sun will provide and it will continue to participate and provide in the ways it always has, in the ways it is uniquely qualified to do, for the tiny but vastly complex speck of the world that it occupies.

I know you are capable of holding space for all of this, that I don’t need to wrap it up tidy with a bow to make us both feel better. I guess I’ll just end this by saying that this practice of truly gifting our attention to the nonhuman beings with whom we share space can feel to me like it’s not “enough.” But every time I do it, I glimpse truths so grounding, so real, that I am certain that it is central to everything else we might do to approach collective and systemic health. Without this attention, we are not present to the actual world around us—the world of rich smells, tactile growth, literal nutrient cycling. We are unmoored, lost in our own abstractions, and susceptible to the distractions foisted upon us by swindlers who to not have our or the planet’s best interests in mind. Our attention makes nurturing relationships possible.

In your last letter, you wrote: “If there is any sort of perfection, it comes from the shape of our relationships. Not in the singular, but in the multitudes. It exists in the way a bumblebee wiggles her body into a penstemon flower; in how a water molecule caresses a cobble on the way downstream; in a chickadee song accompanying a sunrise; the radiant heat of a compost pile; in the intimate exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between us and plants.”

Hear hear! Thank you for gently and patiently guiding our attention toward these brilliant truths.

With everlasting love and gratitude,

Casey