Paying Attention

Sleep-deprived and stress-filled, I just wanted a cup of coffee (or four or five) to get me through the endless hours of work I had before me. I parked my car at Java Joe’s, heaved my backpack onto my shoulder, and headed towards the blissfully altered state of extreme caffeination.

But then I turned around and saw it: the Downtown Growers Market, the white tents and bluegrass boys and munchkins and dogs and food sweet glorious food. The circus was in town and I wanted a ticket. But I felt the weight of my backpack tugging down hard on my shoulder and I knew I’d never get through my work if I let myself take a little three-hour stroll through the market.

A compromise: I took Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and some money out of my backpack, and left my laptop and the rest of my books in the car. I’d go to the market, buy a yellow cucumber ball or two, pet a couple dogs, and sit myself down to a farm-fresh meal in the park, book in hand. Just me and Annie Dillard, breakfasting.

It was a great plan. And it failed miserably. Because I forgot one little thing: I’m curious. About green garden-snake squash and boysenberry chile jam and pink-leafed Wandering Jews and sweet-smelling salves from the good ole’ Kitchen Witch.

But when I sat down, two hours later, I really did intend to get to work. At one of the picnic tables in the park, I placed an open-faced copy of Pilgrim next to a plate of Thai salad greens, and tried to ignore the world as I read about someone else exploring the world.

And then curiosity messed it all up. But this time, it was someone else’s.

“I know you just started,” she said, noticing my little-kid-bookmark tucked into page 10, “but isn’t it just wonderful?”

I look up and see an attractive older woman, smiling eyes framed by thick black frames, friendly face framed by a crop of silvery hair.

I’m too honest for my own good so I tell her, “I’m struggling with this one.”

“Is it for a class?”

And that’s when the connections spark off on their own. I’m taking an environmental writing and rhetoric class; she teaches in sustainability studies. I’m remembering I love farmers markets; she’s organizing a local food fair. I want to learn; she has something to teach me. She recommends films and books and fairs and my brain is racing, wild and coffee-free. We talk and talk and I end up completely ignoring my original breakfast date, Ms. Dillard herself. (Sorry, Annie.)

When she says something about stone soup, I don’t get it. And I won’t get it when I show up at her house the next evening, following some cryptic message she scribbled down for me with nothing but her name, her address, and the time. 6 o’clock and I am here for…something.

And when her two guests walk in the door I still won’t know why I’m here. It’s not until we’re sitting down for a home-cooked meal that I find out what this stone soup business is all about.

“We’re the Stone Soup Listening Tour,” one of the women, an intensely blue-eyed woman in her sixties, tells me.

It turns out that her traveling companion, an executive at the Natural Awakenings office in Maryland, needed to go to California to pick up a car. (Long story, no point in telling it here.) To make the drive from the left coast to the right coast the roadtrip of all roadtrips, she invited a friend and came up with a plan: they would visit every Natural Awakenings office along the route, stopping at 13 cities and…listening.

To what?

Stories. About people coming together in a community, as a community, and working to make things better. Stories about urban gardens and backyard farms, about seedshares and carshares, about Facebook and Twitter changing the way we connect with one another.

When I found out what kinds of stories these women were interested in, honestly my first thought was I was invited to the wrong dinner. What could I have to say? The corn in my backyard is fried to a crunchy brown crisp, I have zero seeds to share, and Facebook to me is more a space to “like” my friends’ quirky status updates than to make any meaningful connections. But then I started talking about my neighborhood, and I realized I did have something to say: about the block party, the community garden, the urban homestead tour. And I realized, to my self-debasing surprise, that they were listening. Because they, too, were curious.

After dinner we went to a seedshare collective, a tribe of radical, and radically friendly, women who that night were getting ready for a seed exchange. The Stone Soup women sat down and listened, and as I wrote “Marigolds ‘09” on bright yellow envelopes in the most gorgeous calligraphy I could muster, I listened, too.

And I listened as the blue-eyed woman told me about why she listens, how there’s so much going on, in every community, all the time. “All you have to do is pay attention,” she said. “Just pay attention.”

I suppose that’s what made this possible in the first place, why I found myself, on a Sunday evening with too much to do and too little sleep to do it, sitting with a bunch of strangers, stuffing marigold seeds into envelopes and exchanging stories. I could’ve gone to Java Joe’s and breakfasted with a book, but I would’ve missed the moment when a stranger asked about the book, when chance was given some room to work its magic. I paid attention to the smell of fire-roasted chile and the sound of a bluegrass band, and when a friendly-faced woman asked me about the book I was reading, I paid attention. Not to the ideas written on the pages of the book, but, in some sense, to those ideas being lived out loud.

And I suppose that is what Annie Dillard, my rejected breakfast date, does, too, in her curious fascination with the extravagance of creation. And Barry Lopez, in his global wanderings, in his reverence for wild animals. And even Walter Beale, in his careful examination and taxonomic classification of written discourse: They pay attention. They go out into the world and explore it, observe it, and let the connections spark.

If we pay attention—if we are open, if we are curious—we may find that we don’t need to fill up those bottomless mugs of coffee to make it through a day’s work. With curiosity and with openness, we may find that the work of simply paying attention is full-filling enough.

But it sure would be nice to explore the world with a steaming mug of coffee in hand.