The Practice Travels With You
This morning, I reached into the pocket of my coat and found a tiny pinecone.
I'd picked it up on a walk a couple of days ago, apparently deciding it was worth bringing home. Then I'd forgotten all about it. There it was, nestled in the corner of my pocket, a little souvenir of an ordinary afternoon.
I turned it over in my hand, admiring its perfect little scales, and wondered what had caught my attention about this particular pinecone. There must have been dozens scattered along the path. Why this one?
I don't remember.
But I do remember the walk. The bright sunshine, the cool air, the sound of leaves underfoot, the particular pleasure of being outside with nowhere I urgently needed to be.
What We Choose to Keep
I have a fondness for things other people might throw away.
Old photographs of people I never knew. Handwritten grocery lists. Pages torn from forgotten books. Ticket stubs, receipts, faded postcards, scraps of paper with someone else's handwriting.
100 Days of Collecting My Life
This morning, I went for a walk.
Nothing particularly extraordinary happened. I do this most every morning. I followed a familiar route, noticed the changing season, and gathered a few things along the way. A leaf. A stem. Various seed pods. Little bits of the world that caught my attention.
I brought them home.
And later, in my studio, I made a collage.
It's just six inches square. A small arrangement of things collected, considered, and composed. Nothing monumental. But when I finished, I placed it in a basket on my worktable, where it will be joined by another tomorrow.
And another the day after that.
One hundred days. One hundred collages.
Collecting | Yellowstone
There are many ways to remember a place.
You can take photographs. Buy the postcard. Bring home the sticker. Write down where you went and what you saw.
Or you can begin to collect the place while you are still inside it.
That’s what I found myself doing in Yellowstone.
I arrived with a battered old book I’d turned into a travel journal, a tiny watercolor palette, a little notebook for field notes, a vintage tobacco tin, a pen, and a canvas bag that said:
I notice because I make.
I make because I notice.
Which, it turns out, was exactly the right equipment.
Not because I intended to make beautiful pages while sitting beside geysers.
I didn’t.
I wanted something much simpler.
I wanted to pay attention.
Collecting Your Life
For a long time, I’ve been interested in noticing.
The small things. The ordinary things. The things we walk past every day because we think we already know them.
The light moving across the kitchen table. A sentence overheard in a coffee shop. The particular blue of the evening sky. A grocery list tucked into a pocket. A flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk. The way someone you love always tells the same story.
I’ve written often about paying attention to these things.
But lately, I’ve become interested in what happens next.
What do we do with what we notice?