Platonia
“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.
L. M. Sacasas • If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
If we set out to ask a question and rush to answer it, we haven't allowed the question to hang suspended over the void, We haven't listened.
Open-endedness creates the space for a response to come. Let's call this space a "pause." The pause is not only the secret of knowing yourself, it is the secret of all healing. Within the pause, the response... See more
Open-endedness creates the space for a response to come. Let's call this space a "pause." The pause is not only the secret of knowing yourself, it is the secret of all healing. Within the pause, the response... See more
it’s wildly fun to pay attention to things. To think about smallness. To look back at the overlooked. But it’s even more wildly fun to do such things and then share in the results of that attention with others.
Devin Kelly • Yanyi's "Detail"
Seek wordless states of being
Not all questions seek answers, some seek journeys.
No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a new way of framing, of thinking, of imagining. The delight of reading involves developing an awareness of the way so many people pay attention to this world, and to themselves.
Devin Kelly • Yanyi's "Detail"
‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’ […]