Noting

February

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. – David Whyte 

Attention is the beginning of devotion. – Mary Oliver 

Be here now. – Ram Dass 

There is ecstasy in awareness. – Anne Lamott 

To pay attention is to come into the presence of a subject. In one of its root senses it is to stretch toward a subject in a kind of aspiration. – Wendell Berry. 

People say the devil is in the details and I hate that because it’s like, the beauty of the world is in the details. – Sam Thayer

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As soon as I learned to write in first grade, I developed a curious tick — using my pointer finger as a proxy pen, I’d hold it up in the air like a conductor and scribe invisible dictation of whatever people were saying within earshot. I have no memory of why I began doing this - I can only imagine that something in the process of learning to write had awakened some ancient part of my brain with an electric prod and from then on that live-wired Broca’s region of my frontal lobe was running the show like a dictator. Luckily, my introverted-ness was inflamed by the side-eye glances this habit was getting me, and I learned to bring my hand down to the desktop and then beneath the table to my thigh, where I still sometimes catch my finger transcribing what I’m hearing, but so barely, I could engrave it all on a grain of rice. It just dawned on me now that if they had long-hand courtroom stenographers before typewriters - this may have been my supreme calling.

The appeal was probably two-pronged. One, because the act of writing is inherently pleasing to me, personally, but two, because historically, noting is vital for human survival — it was a south wind when we were able to stalk within striking distance of the deer in that valley, we catch the most fish from this river when this stonefly is hatching and the sun is this high in the sky, we got sick when we ate the bear meat raw, but not the venison, did you see that everywhere there were white flowers this spring there are now ripe fruits in summer, everyone who ate those red berries died except for the one who spit the seeds out - this kind of thing. Notes of survival-level import tend to stick in the mind without having to write them down and we passed them effectively mouth to ear until language jumped to the page.

Most of us, myself included, live, now, it seems, believing that all things critical to our survival have already been noted by people before us, and those notes, carved in some stone as our collective “truths”, will remain true in perpetuity. This seems unlikely. Noting, even occasionally, saves us from losing ourselves completely in the uniquely human delusion that this life is ours, alone, and everything else happening on this spinning sphere is in some kind of stasis. It keeps us tethered to the real, moving earth instead of in the one-person-drama, filmed in the shabby one-room set of our minds. I wish I could say that I take notes for this honorably and logical reason, but, as is often my impetus, it’s mostly just a compulsion that’s grown into an awareness that this habit makes me better at the things I like - foraging, hunting, writing, cooking, gardening, listening and because my memory is such a black hole that if I didn’t write the good stuff down I would forget absolutely everything except for every single time my feelings have been hurt - those seem to have to clinging capacity of burdock seeds.

I don’t take the kind of notes that are going to save humanity - really only to just barely save myself from getting mired in my own one-man show, but I love the idea of being an active participant in our collective consciousness, even if it all just turns to dust. I revisit most notes annually for the purpose of approaching each season a little more effectively than the last. Now that it’s March, I’m looking back at March notes from years passed to see what I’ve done, what I’ve wanted to do, and what I could do better. Most of Appetites is born already of notes that I’ve compiled and elongated but I thought it might be interesting if, at the end of each month, I share the rough and dirty notes, field notes, kitchen notes, late-night notes, scribbled in the margins notes, in the spirit of a less curated, more immediate, mouth-to-ear style of passing my observations along.

Yesterday I looked through my notes from February and started plucking out lines that struck me as commemorative of the month. These lines began coming together and arranging themselves in this easy, magnetic way that built this poem that actually crystalizes this February for me in a way I don’t think I could have done by any other method. A handful of these lines are quotes or lines from other people that I’d written down - I think they’re pretty self-evident but to err on the side of ethical plagiarism I can’t take credit for the best six lines here but I will take credit for noting them. Original credit to Jim Harrison, Rumi, Maupassant, Anthony Bourdain, and Terence McKenna.