Pay attention, Lot

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

This perspective feels rather soothing to me. In my existential dive into the question what love is, I find many different definitions and examples - and even more sensorial impressions. At the core, the emphasis of seeking poets and determined philosophers lies upon an act, an art, a process, or a way of being together, a way of relating. Yet, burdened by many myths, love can often seem a fleeting feeling, unbearably far away for the wounded healers, open only to the happy few or threateningly filled with unwanted suffering and unfulfilled needs. Leaning back into love as a way of being responsive, a way of nurturing each other’s presence into being, I spontaneously imagine love to be a form of devotional yet silent attention. The kind of attention that encompasses the one and the many all at once, is indeed patient in its companionship and graceful in its unrelenting curiosity and courage to set free. Put more simply, attentive responsivity it what makes or breaks the spirit of love. Seeing everything that captures our attention nowadays, this is indeed a challenge. My senses easily get oversaturated. How to love ourselves back into this world, this being in and of the earthly world? Listening with all my senses, honoring the whole of the other as an expanding part of my intimate experience, is a delicate orchestration between opening my heart, finetuning my senses and discernibly inhibiting overdue projections. Pay attention Lot, listen, to the shivering hints of being-here of what is understood as 'other' and 'out there'.