Tuesday, February 17: Attention as Love

Reflection from Alalá Linda:

Walking the Camino, I came to know that within about ninety seconds, rain would begin. Just enough time to set down my pack, pull out the rain gear, shrug it on, and shoulder the weight again. I did not know this because I had studied the sky or calculated the temperature. Nothing so deliberate. It was my body that knew.

After nearly a month on the path, my mind occupied only with walking, resting, eating, laundry, company, sleep, and then walking again, my name and biography had become incidental. I was simply a peregrino--and each peregrino was every peregrino.

No longer a separate-self moving through a landscape, I had climbed down out of my head and into my whole body. My attention was no longer the narrow beam of a strategizing mind. My skin was attending. My breath was attending. The edges of my seeing were attending. I was not “analyzing inputs.” I had become a channel through which the world flowed—inner and outer, in and out, breath and steps and rhythm.

And this whole-bodied attending unexpectedly opened a portal within, to the invisible, the ineffable, the eternal. Boundaries between inner and outer, creature and creation, became permeable. What I “knew” (and how I knew it), had a new quality, illuminated not by calculation or thought, but by presence, by collaborative attention—an alert, objectless awareness that became the space where everything happened.

As Iain McGilchrist writes, “The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves… In this it has something of the structure of love.”

Attention as Love, attending.

x Alalá