Mary Oliver was a wonderful poet. These are her instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. I shared those words at the end of a workshop last week about the power of words and how to make better use of them. I found myself stressing the importance of the third instruction, the one to ‘tell about it’.
It’s a powerful thing to notice your experience, to be more aware of your passage through life, and to do so with a mindset that seeks wonder and astonishment. And there’s something joyous about finding astonishment in the smallest of things, the most unlikely of places. But it’s also important to ‘tell about it’, to share with others whatever it is you are paying attention to and being astonished by.
Why is it so important to tell about it, even if nobody else is listening? I’m not sure why, but I feel it to be true. It’s a question I want to explore by posting at least something here each day for the next 30 days. What am I paying attention to? What am I being astonished by? What happens when I tell about it? Let’s see where this leads.
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