How a Poet Saw America

"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.

"We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. 

"All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

— Mary Oliver

Rain on the Roof

Few sounds comfort with 

the rhythmic efficiency 

of rain on the roof.

The Answer is Attention

The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties. 

We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.

After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.