In 2007 when I was living in Cape Town, South Africa, I wrote an essay called “On Noticing.” I had read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and all I wanted to do was live inside those ideas forever. That was my first experience reading something I felt had been written especially for me. To wonder about what it means to notice, to be in/with/of something and also distant from it, to delight inside the spaces of seashells, nests, corners, and miniature, to be present in the smallest slice of moment with the smallest speck of an object is home for me.

Noticing is where I find (and practice) stillness and silence. What’s there, what’s not there, what was there before, and what might be dreamed there—but the whole of it is in the process of being present in the moment of noticing, recognizing that I am the one who notices and what is noticed is separate from me. And it’s this distance—the space between—that tugs me back again and again, captures my intellectual mind and sparks the joy of my heart.

It is now January 2020. I am the 4 year-old girl hiding beneath a tablecloth noticing people’s feet and counting the strawberries on my bedspread at night. I am the woman who traveled and lived in South Africa for a good part of my thirties in order to notice some piece of myself that I couldn’t find or be when I was in the US. Writing this now in my attic studio in Pittsburgh, I am on my favorite rock next to Indian Ocean, and in the Minnesota home where I was born. And I am noticing my noticing. I am finding (remembering) a depth/simplicity in what it means to notice and why it matters.

More than ever before, I feel the importance of noticing outside of categories and boxes, outside of identities and the naming of things. This importance lies in what it allows for my wholeness and the wholeness of other beings. It matters for who I am in everything I do, whether it be with adults, children, or a blank page (as well as creatures, small objects, nature).

There is no separation between who I am as a teacher or a writer or a being. My meditation practice is not separate from my advocacy for children. My writing—nonfiction, essay, poem, or picture book—is always inherently personal. But I haven’t always allowed myself to say this. I have most typically separated my thinking about noticing into a personal bucket (private conversations about philosophy and personal writing) and a public bucket (translated application of ideas for educators and children).

I have spent a significant amount of my life trying to say things in ways that might be heard, trying to fit ideas into systems or structures in ways that might be of service, trying to separate out parts of me or my thinking that don’t seem to suit a particular context or question. I have noticed this for some time and felt its dissonance, and my entire 2018-2019 was releasing layers of this, but right now, as I watch the snowflakes delight outside my window, I know I am free.

I know from the deepest place of my heart that noticing outside of categories or the naming of things is a noticing of healing and love. I know that such noticing is essential and transformative for children, both in how we as adults notice children and also in how we support children to notice themselves and the world around them.

I also know that the way I experience and think about noticing doesn’t easily translate or fit into current structures and systems. That’s okay. In fact, I believe I have found myself to be here in this moment, where I live/work in the between spaces, in order to finally be clear enough to speak my truth, to collapse the categories of my own thinking, to let myself be at once teacher-writer-personal-political-spiritual-being.

That said, let me share five questions I believe are worthy of our collective thought, practice, and conversation right now:

·      What might it mean to notice the wholeness of a child without seeking to describe any attributes in any categories towards anything to be named/identified/understood?

·      What might happen if we set out to not-know a child as our primary endeavor to best support and love them?

·      What might it look like to notice the whole of an educator or the whole of an organization without seeking to interpret, evaluate, or know?

·      What might happen if we notice for what’s not there, notice for the stillness and silence when we’re in a moment we feel is positive for learning? (Instead of finding “stuff” to add to places in need of healing and love, how might we think about what to get rid of, how to create more open space so places can be more of who/what they already are? And, btw, all spaces need healing and love.)

·      What if (in our schools, organizations, classrooms, homes) we released all stories of “urgency” and all decisions based in “cause-effect” or “means-to-an-outcome” logic and focused on noticing and growing and loving the present moment for the sake of itself?

And a final thought. When we find ourselves in contexts where such questions don’t seem “practical” or “efficient” or “measurable” or “realistic,” one more question might be: What additional kinds of boxes, categories, identities, or naming of things might we release?

light and love, melissa

I know from the deepest place of my heart that noticing outside of categories or the naming of things is a noticing of healing and love.

What additional kinds of boxes, categories, identities, or naming of things might we release?

Melissa A. Butler is a noticer-of-small-things. She supports others to grow more slowness and trust for children’s depth of learning.