What Found Me While I Wasn’t Trying to Make Anything

This morning I went outside to water the garden.

The season is beginning to turn. There is still abundance everywhere—flowers, bees, hummingbirds, grasses heavy with movement—but we are crossing quietly into harvest.

I watched several kinds of bees moving through the flowers I planted. Hummingbirds came and went. The tall grasses bent and lifted in the wind.

And then I noticed one very small bee working at one very small purple bloom.

The flower kept moving beneath it, nudged again and again by little gusts of wind. The bee adjusted, held on, returned to the center, gathered what it could.

I stood there longer than I needed to.

Lately I’ve been thinking about attention as something we bring to the world.

A practice.

Something we choose.

Something we remember to do.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether that is only half of it.

Because so much of what has mattered lately has arrived when I wasn’t looking for anything at all.

A loon eating a crappie on the lake.

A rock covered with freshwater clam shells, leaving me wondering who had gathered them there.

An apple beside the trail with my husband.

A fire settling into red coals.

Astro choosing a patch of grass beneath the birch.

Willow branches moving above a hammock.

Copper changing beneath my hands at the bench.

And this morning, a tiny bee holding its place on a flower moving in the wind.

None of these moments asked to become anything.

They did not need to become a painting, a perfume, a lesson, a photograph, or even a story.

They were complete before I arrived.

Perhaps attention is not only something we offer.

Perhaps relationship begins when we become available to what is already offering itself to us.

The season turns.

The grasses move.

The hummingbird arrives.

The bee holds on.

And sometimes, if we are there long enough, the world finds us.

— Susan

Aromatic Traditions

Pay Attention. Deepen Relationship. Return Often.