A walk in the garden

with mum

“Is it possible to practice noticing? I think so. But I also think it require a suspension of yearning and a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself. Notiticing is about letting yourself out into the world, rather than siphoning the world into you in order to transmute it into words.”

I’m standing in Mum’s garden. She says there is not much to photography but I am not so sure. We wander around while she talks about her garden. The cuttings from her neighbour. The dahlia from a friend. A rose that has special meaning. The brute of a plant that has been removed. These are all the little sentences that make up the story of a garden. Her garden, a garden which is different to mine. It is always neat and tidy with measures of control I know I will never obtain. As she talks I find treasures to photograph. She observes me commenting that there is more here to look at than she realised. I am capturing autumn in her garden. It is part of the story of how a garden is different in different seasons. She starts to see the garden as I do with my camera.

“Practicing noticing will also help you learn more about patience and the nature of your mind. Noticing means thinking with all your senses.”

I think how our walk together allowed a quietness to unfold between us as we observed the garden. Each of us looking at it with different eyes. I think of the weather, the cold nip in the air, the echo of the frost that we would have felt had we visited the garden earlier. The scent of dew or if I leaned in closer the daphne, a winter memory of a bush outside a childhood window.

“So what is noticing? A pinpoint of awareness, the detail that stands out amid all the details. It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the things you notice and paying attention as you free yourself.”

And I think this is why I like time in the garden. The looking that comes when you have a camera and you are wishing to capture the mood of what you feel when standing in space centered around nature.

“It requires no gear, no special tools, no apparatus. You practice noticing as part of your ordinary life”

Several Short sentences about writing - Verlyn Klinkenborg