✨ Long post ahead: Three weeks into the new year, I’ve been aching. Aching for community and solitude, for peace and justice, for home and adventure. I’ve been presented with beautiful gifts and heartbreaking loss. I’ve paid close attention in navigating these waves I’ve fortunately and unfortunately come to know quite well. I read this passage from The Artist’s Way this morning — a timely reminder. I hope it encourages anyone who struggles with a hypersensitive heart and anxious mind as it did me. “The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutter-ably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection... Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable... Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty. The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater, and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated above the garden, washing the cactus silver. When I think now about my mother’s death, I remember that snowy moon.” May you pay attention to the snowy moon on the hardest day or the most mundane. Mine this month: disco music, my elderly cat’s steady breath, my first proper NY bagel in London, California sunsets and frosty London parks. It’s the simplest messages I constantly need to hear. Pay attention. Be where you are. ❤️ #january #grief #artistsway #contrasts