Where Attention Goes, Energy Flows. If we offer intense presence to integrity & beauty, we will find love in that which has drawn the gift of our deep attention.

-Erie Chapman

   What commands your attention? Whatever it is, that’s where the power of your energy is directed. Like millions of men and women, I’ve kicked an awful lot of Saturdays & Sundays through the goal posts directing my energy to men playing football. I enjoy watching sports, but part of me always wonders – so what?
   Another thing I do in my idle time is water the grass. We have automatic sprinklers, but I also like to water the grass myself. As you know by now, most things are one kind of meditation or another to me and
almost everything lends itself to allegory. Watering the grass has a function, of course. But I enjoy things like this more if I seek to appreciate the deeper meanings: the way sunlight catches the spray, the pressure of the hose against my hand, the smell of the wet grass.(click on photo to enlarge)
   So what? Football games, grass watering, driving to and from work. What draws attention during these in between times in life? Meditation is about rest – relaxing and breathing while imagining images that support easing back from the noise of the world. There’s no need to do anything other than gaze at streams of water as they strike the light…

As you click on these images to enlarge them, the temptation will be to identify what you see with your surface vision and then to quickly move on. Stay a little longer, ten or twenty seconds, with the image. Imagine yourself into the picture. It’s a sunny day in the low seventies and the world is as gorgeous as it can become.
   
If the thing to which we give our attention has beauty, grace, elegance, integrity, we may come to love that thing. And the more we give to it or him or her our attention, the more we love – in part because of the investment of our hearts. After all, if we give years of our lives to caring for patients, we have invested enormous amounts of our energy.
   Why invest energy in something we don’t love? Why spend our days in work which is not our calling?
   But what do we do when we become tired of something or someone we once thought we loved? Fatigue may be because we have failed to see in a new way. Looking from another angle, we may discover, anew, a much richer dimension and texture to the the thing, the job or the person we thought we knew. We may see life and brightness and golden light where we had come to see gray.
   So this meditation is about more than sprays of water in a green-gold back yard in Tennessee. It is
about where we put our attention and how we see. It is about looking in new and different ways at the common and the ordinary. It is about seeing the people we know at some level deeper than the thin slice of a single impression. It is about entering into communion with the other.
   The essence of loving care is seeing the person for whom we care for as more than their surface, their so called "vital signs." Yes, blood pressure and heart rate are important.
But the true vital signs are seen in the eyes, in the voice, in the touch.

   Each of the six pictures in this series was taken of the same ordinary garden hose spraying ordinary water into an ordinary little back yard. Seeing in a different way requires forgetting about the function of watering and shifting attention to the water itself, to light, to color, to texture, to the fragrance of wet, to the feel of water and temperate air on the hands and in the face.
    This is all about the phenomenon of what may be called Profound Presence. This is another phrase I use here to describe sacred presence to the world around us. Profound Presence requires more than just looking carefully. The approach calls us to shake old patterns and common ways of seeing – to open the door to our souls as well as our hearts so that we may be present to the exquisite.
   The world is flooded with the bright energy of love. It available to us as a gift from God. What we are asked to do is to ease back from the day to day and to re-engage the world with sacred eyes. Caregivers know this in the intimacy of their experience with patients that, because of their pain, are deeply vulnerable.
   Look again at the way sprays of water affect our view of light and color. Look again at the world you will encounter today. Love awaits us in the shadows as well as the sunlight. Drink the gift of this love. Know God’s presence.