“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
―Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
When I first moved to Minneapolis in 2013, I knew three people in the metropolitan Twin Cities and knew very little of the city I suddenly called home. After a few weeks of feeling alone and overwhelmed, I decided to engage in a project which would meet two goals: allow me to get to know my new city more intimately and to share my experiences with friends and family who were far away. Each day, I made the effort to get out, either on foot or by bike, and explore some part of the city. Each day, I took a single photograph with my phone and posted it to social media as a photo of the day.
This project had a number of unintended consequences. First, it kept me active when fear of the unknown could have kept me in my apartment. Second, it encouraged me to explore places I might otherwise have passed by—sometimes I would glimpse, for example, a spot of color in an alley which turned out, upon investigation, to be a lovely mural hidden in plain sight. Third, as I looked at the city around me, I found myself seeing with new eyes: small pockets of beauty or irony or a vignette that told a story to anyone who chose to look more closely. Finally, it instilled in me a deeper love and appreciation of place than I could have imagined. Even though I only lived in Minneapolis for two years, I still miss the city and my old neighborhood there.
Attention is the beginning of devotion, says Mary Oliver, whose attention flowered into poetry that expressed her devotion to the natural world and that speaks so meaningfully to our hearts. That we can grow to love that to which we pay attention is one way to read Oliver’s line. Another is that by paying attention, we enter more deeply into the essence or meaning of the thing we regard, and that this opens us up so we can traverse the space from the specific to the universal. From contemplation of this beautiful mural (or tree or cat) I can access Beauty. From contemplation of this person (or place or thing) I love, I come into the presence of Love.
“All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.”
―Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director