Kept
Window frost beading and going home
Cold sun mornings sow reminders
Of fragility. Whose sadness did you inherit?
How’ve you honored it?
Like a relic? Like a feud?
In the strangest afternoon of our souls,
I had seen your good eyes
and hoped in high spirals
Attention
It makes me sad that we’ve given the word ‘attention’ a negative connotation. People who want attention are annoying, self-centered, careless, vapid, etc. Are they? Sometimes, sure, but if you take ‘attention’ out of its commodified context, it’s a very beautiful thing. To pay attention to someone or something is to choose it. Choosing to know, to give your time, your space, your agency to something/one for a period of time. To honor them by knowing them. To learn from them and be shaped by them. It’s a sprawlingly beautiful thing. It’s the way we get access to sprawlingly beautiful things. I hope we can find ways to reclaim the word from its current collective meaning. It’s not yours to demand. It’s yours to give. Yours to honor something, someone with. Yours to use to love other people, to know them and to be changed by them, to cultivate a kinder, gentler will for yourself to pay even better, even more sacrificial attention to the world around you.
Idealism
I used to apologize a lot for being an idealist about things that are inconvenient to idealize. But isn’t that the point of idealism? It’s inconvenient to reach an ideal. It feels unrealistic to reach an ideal if you’re not willing to inconvenience yourself to do so. But as I get older and hopefully a little smarter, I’ve found idealism increasingly important. The job of having is a good vision for the future is, fundamentally, the job of the idealist. Idealism holds a collective mindset to a certain standard. It, in many ways, literally determines what is possible. It determines what is likely. What people try to achieve. That kind of stuff. Here’s how it made sense to me;
You can’t have a better world without someone doing imagining regarding what it could look like. Idealistic ambition. The enterprise of making possible the New by bringing it into imaginative existence. Building bridges of possibility between the concrete and the ideal by introducing gradations of the New, beautiful, eternal, and possible that climb towards a larger, more sweeping vision of what might be.
What is real needs a vision—a clear, negotiable, worthwhile, good vision—of what is possible to justify its own existence. To justify its continuation. The vision has to be substantial beyond the material. It’s not a function of technology, industry, or society. The capacity to idealize well, to idealize constructively, is the capacity to seek a greater, more complete Spirit. That’s why visionary idealism is essential and ignoring it is so dangerous. To relegate ‘idealism’ to the territory of the feeble and the unreal is to willfully disconnect from the serious search for what’s Good and what’s actually possible.
That said, idealism needs an accurate view of what is currently real, actual, true, and possible to craft a responsible vision of what should be sought. Without that kind of understanding, there’s no way to envision something people can touch and desire with anything resembling hope.
A real, deep understanding of the past/present is what enables a prophetic (in the broadest sense) vision of the future.
To idealize well is to understand what is true/real with uncommon depth. There must be some crafting of a vision that looks beyond what is convenient in favor of what is good. That’s not a bad thing. If nobody does it, good visions don't get created and nobody gets held accountable for what they want.
There’s bad idealism, useless idealism, escapist idealism, certainly. But there’s also good idealism that far too often mocked for its unrealism and juvenility when it simply asks for more than the mocker is willing to sacrifice. It simply hopes for more than the mocker is willing to imagine.
Maybe that’s the way God feels about me. I am routinely unwilling to sacrifice what I am asked. I am routinely unwilling to imagine what I am asked to hope for and in. Maybe that’s where it starts. With the ultimate visionary and the ultimate vision.