Paying better attention

...and writing our Hundred Acre Heart stories in our next workshop

I stayed up half the night to watch the night blooming jasmine unfold itself to the world at 3 a.m., on the steps outside my screened in porch. Another night, I climbed onto my giant paddle board and paddled all night to the full moon up the Kalihiwai river with a friend, talking about magic and intentions and love.

I wasn’t always like this, but I had my moments before where I stopped and paid better attention. When my daughter was ten we climbed onto the roof of a hostel somewhere halfway up the coast of California to watch the shooting stars.

If I’m honest, most of my adult responsible life I was in a hurry. I had the heart and the movement of a hummingbird - I loved cities, and opera and theatrical performances and the all night of of pounding rhythms or buttery jazz, leaving nightclubs with musical notes in my hair and concrete in my soul, and taking deep exhaust-fume breaths.

But life happens, and one day, after a broken heart and chipping ice off my windshield until I couldn’t feel my fingers, I decided I wanted sunshine and health and ocean all year round, and maybe even ripe avocados in my salad.

I drove across country during my first Saturn Return and moved to Southern California.

But despite the ocean and the arrival of my beautiful daughter, I went back to being a hummingbird - hosting meetings, hiring employees and signing contracts. I was pollinating so many lives while forgetting about my own - a lie I told myself that eventually caught up with me.

My daughter’s first word was truck, and I didn’t miss any part of her life - I was always so honored to be a mother, but being a single parent without any form of child support kept me in the lane of the hummingbird. I often escaped to Will Rogers Park at sunset to look over the city while inhaling sage, staring into the eyes of a coyote and side stepping the deer on the way to the parking lot. Always I returned to freeways and childcare and contracts - needing to pay for tutors and braces and rent.

I was a hummingbird in a woman’s body and it was time to migrate again.

When I finally slowed down, my daughter was a teenager, and we began practicing yoga together and going to the gym and walking at night down to the beach.

One day, while walking Hanalei Bay, my daughter said, “Mom, why don’t you look at the mountains? You’re always looking down.”

By then I had a small place by a stream on Kauai, and took her there for the summer with her best friend Rachel. When I awoke to a breakfast spread one morning cooked for by the girls, I knew they wanted something, and I was right. They didn’t want to go back to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles, and neither did I.

That was seventeen years ago and I’ve been looking up ever since.

I had stepped outside of awe, that rare, personal place where the small details of the world enter your hummingbird heart, and turned it into a human heart - connected with all the mysteries of the world.

Virginia Wolf said the strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.

Without awe and attention, we are missing the world - or even worse, we are allowing the terrible of the world in, and leaving the beautiful out. With just the news entering us we cannot hear the owls calling to each other across a canyon, miss the baby pigs moving across the field at two a.m. or how to decipher the cry of a cow.

Devin Kelly wrote on his Substack, Ordinary Plots -

And it is spring I have to thank for the fact that, returning each morning, I get to look at this little man who is now here, and who, each day, one day older from the date of his birth, is his own testament to spring, a smile blooming where just the day before it had not been, a new sound emerging from his mouth at a timbre and tone and octave absolutely unique from any sound uttered from his mouth before. Blink, I know, and I would have missed that first smile. Do not listen, I know, and I would have missed that new sound.

Living on Kauai surrounded by cows and orchids and wasps and flies, and children and summer sunsets, I’m reminded over and over to pay attention.

Perhaps I am still a hummingbird, just a different version, pausing long enough to taste the nectar.

<3

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LITerati Academy’s next 6-week summer writing series is The Hundred Acre Heart: Writing into the Themes of Our Shared Humanity begins mid July. We will explore imagination, first losses, friendship, memory, courage, and the stories that shaped us.

Registration is now open to returning students (reach out to me if you didn’t see it in your Inbox) -and opens to new students on June 21st.

Privately message Laura Lentz or visit LITerati Academy for more information or click on the link in comments section below.