Noticing into
Sometimes I stare for a long time at the plant near my desk. I count its leaves, note each bend, imagine circles that continue from the tips, find the brown bits, the scratches, sometimes bite marks from my cat’s teeth. I estimate the space between the leaves, in centimeters, then less, and I hover here for a while, let my sight travel through and back like I’m crawling between layers of earth. I allow my wondering to fall around me, sometimes it’s blurry or like floating. Then I listen in… usually I close my eyes. I am with the plant, listening. I allow myself to stay—to listen, to be, to wonder from a place outside of my mind. At some point, I stretch my arms like a T and press against two of the long, green leaves, feel into their strength. They hold their shape, and they hold me.
Noticing into things is more than imagination. It’s not of romance or whimsy. It’s delightful, yes. It’s also transcendent. And it’s the essence of curiosity—a beautiful dance of rigor and play to find more in what’s there through unknowing it.
As I wrote recently in my post on “Play in the Overlaps”: The most important thing we can do right now as citizens of this world is to be exceedingly curious about everything. We need to embrace a holistic and rigorous curiosity, not a watered down, romanticized version, or a kind we use only some of the time when it feels easy or comfortable.
How can we practice ways to notice into as part of our everyday way of being, not only with small things that we might delight to notice more (like a plant or a bird or a button), but also with ideas, beliefs, people, events, and feelings that seem too big or too noisy or too uncomfortable?
Here are three things you might want to try as you play with your noticing and find ways to notice into things for which you’d like to bring more curiosity:
Frame it small.
Whether you’re thinking of a person in your life, an event in the news, or an issue about which you have strong feelings, let your mind drift out, out, out and sense into an expanded space beyond yourself. Then, bring the person/event/issue into your awareness and see it as something small in your hand. There is immense space around it with webs of ideas, feelings, ways of knowing all around it and you. Sit for a while in this expanded view of things, seeing yourself and this “thing,” as small.
Crawl around inside it.
Let yourself go into this small thing. Encounter it for the first time. Poke around to find out about it… wonder about what it knows, how it sees and understands, why it lives and loves. Keep your perspectives fluid and try numerous orientations. Use your five senses, and connect with senses beyond these, too. Ask it questions. Ask yourself questions. Crawl, stretch, walk, maybe run, and eventually find a place to sit and rest. Let yourself be held by this small thing. You are inside it, wandering in wondering.
Listen and let it teach you things.
You do not (have to) know about this “small” thing. Let yourself be surprised. Listen and sense into what it knows and has to say. Let yourself sit still for as long as it takes. In your silence and stillness, trust that there is something for you to learn. Receive whatever happens. Don’t doubt it or lessen it.
Would you like to transform how you feel right now about the world or shift something that seems like a big problem or mess? Take one idea/issue/group of people/event that you have strong opinions/beliefs about and let yourself go through the three layers of “noticing into” described above. Allow whatever you find to bring you deeper and deeper into curiosity. Let this open you to new layers of wonder and not-knowing about the one “thing,” as well as about yourself. Notice what happens.
love and light, Melissa
Noticing into things is more than imagination.
It’s the essence of curiosity—a beautiful dance of rigor and play to find more in what’s there through unknowing it.
“One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)
“We now know that there is not one space and one time only, but that there are as many spaces and times as there are subjects, as each subject is contained by its own environment which possesses its own space and time.” (Jacob von Uexkull, Theoretical Biology)
“Home isn’t always a place is it?” (Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse)
Everything that’s possible exists in small things.
This is why I write, design, facilitate, collaborate, speak, and teach about how to leverage small things for learning and transformation.
