Pocket Observatory is where I invite you to pay attention with me.
We hear a lot about the problem of attention scarcity. Our shortening attention spans are exploited by an expanding attention economy. A medicine shortage left people with attention disorders short of care. And with the acceleration of LLM adoption, it’s increasingly difficult to tell if we are giving our attention to something real.
But we do not always pay attention to why our attention actually matters.
To pay attention is to attend. And to attend is to stretch toward in the way a supplicant stretches forward in supplication. Here, I share my observations about what we attend to and what attends to us.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” - Mary Oliver
Devotion comes from the “Latin votum, "a promise to a god, solemn pledge, dedication; that which is promised; a wish, desire, longing, prayer.” De- means completely in this context. To be devoted is to be comprehensively promised.
I carry my observatory with me, in the shape of a deep skirt pocket. It’s equipped with simple instruments: a notebook, a pen and a camera.
With these tools, I collect old light from trending topics, search kitchen crumbs for atomic insights and listen for the cultural frequencies moving through our space and time. Each scratch of writing and bit of audio is one single imprecise measure of one point in existence.
Readers help me make sense of my observations, often by sharing their own observance. Sometimes I tihnk we might be charting new corners of existence together. That would be wonderful, but it’s not necessary. This pocket is more concerned with the measure of all things than mapping them.
Observation is part of the scientific method. We have to notice before we can seek. It’s also the word we use to describe the performance of a rite. Observation helps believers heed what they cannot hear. I am not a scientist. I am not religious. But I am observant.
If this were an observatory like the ones built in Ancient Greece, it would have a statue of Mary Oliver at its center.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? - Mary Oliver, Poem 133: The Summer Day
I am closest to almost understanding my existence when I find myself in a state I describe as “homesick for a home I don’t know.” I use the word “homesick” because it’s a feeling that comes from a deep place I can’t name. An urgent longing, met by the pull of home.
This feeling of almost understanding is like that, but deeper and less knowable. It happens when I pay attention to little things and big things, too. It’s a recognition I can’t quite recognize. There’s a sense that some of the particles that make me up have a charge that pulls them towards a state or a place or something that knows them.
And there is the slightest sensation that if I could get the rest of my particles to rotate the right way, my whole self would be transported or transmuted or something. And when I am paying attention, when I am really, really paying attention, sometimes, I have this sense that a particle or two has turned. Perhaps forever, perhaps not.
Do I ever think I’ll be able to fully turn to whatever pulls me? No. Not really. But each tiny rotation feels like proof of a promise of which I am just one part. What is on the other side of this promise? I don’t know. But it feels like love.
Whatever it is, I want to devote myself to it. I have a feeling that if I do, I’ll devote myself to everything and everyone else promised to it, which is everything and everyone.
It is the honor of my life that readers decide to join me in my observance and teach me through their own.
My work has been shared in:
Publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Slate, and the Guardian US.
Books like Jessica Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood and Pooja Lakshmin’s Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included)
Podcasts like Vox’s Today, Explained and NPR’s It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders and documentaries like The Rise and Fall of LulaRoe
