What Keeps Glinting?
on noticing and collecting in the Magpie Practice
What shiny things draw my attention? What can I not help but look at, listen to, think about?
Noticing details is not efficient. They’re not always obvious. I don’t always know why something catches my eye, and I certainly don’t always know why I feel compelled to collect it. But attention and awareness—this is where the Magpie Practice begins.
Let’s take a gander at a few recent entries in my commonplace book:
Captured after an online workshop about Appreciative Inquiry: Every problem is the expression of a frustrated dream. What is the dream? Talk about how it could be. Talk about potential.
Captured after reading this article about artist Mark Hearld: More ingredients = richer collage.
Captured from a poem by Flannery O’Connor: “The moral basis of poetry is the accurate naming of the thing of God.”
Captured after reading the Wikipedia page for “thinking about the immortality of the crab,” a Spanish idiom about daydreaming: Daydream differently.
Captured after offering dignity rather than correction to a friend: The big picture doesn’t overtake the snapshot.
I try to always be ready, always receptive to glints like these because they often arrive uninvited. They often appear when I’m not trying to be productive, when I am just noticing, appreciating, coasting. Receptivity requests that I hold any thoughts gently and without judgment; that is how I give them enough time to develop.
A developing question about what it means to live poetically: is poetry a way of seeing rather than a genre? Is genre too small of a word to contain the spaciousness of poetry?
Catching a shiny thought can be the point by itself. There may be pressure to turn everything into output so that ideas are not “wasted,” but sometimes this rush to use things closes the door on deeper meaning. We don’t allow ideas to rest, to let meaning ripen. On the contrary, collection can be enough. Collection can be joyful.
A developing question: is the concept of collection equivalent to joy? Can people collect things that don’t bring them joy? Is there such a thing as a grumpy collection?
I work in a library, which is to me a clear representation of joyful collection. However, when students come to my classroom for research workshops, they aren’t usually thrilled to be doing the systematic collection we call research. After all, when they read a written work, they only see the finished version rather than all the thinking, working, and collecting that goes on behind the scenes. The choices and decisions that go into research are invisible to them—as they are to most professional researchers and writers, too! We don’t always review or even keep the record of our thought process, partly because our culture rewards products rather than processes.
To make matters worse, research often means spending long periods of time in uncertainty. Uncertainty is so dreadfully uncomfortable for most of us; the source of my own crippling anxiety is often the uncertainty of the future. For many people, however, uncertainty is so unpleasant that they clamp onto the first available answer regardless of its salience. They don’t usually sit with the uncertainty long enough for truth to develop or emerge. Breaking news, for instance, breeds supposition and theorizing without having enough time for facts and context to reveal themselves. As consumers of breaking news, we make judgments with very little information (and sketchy information at that) because we despise feeling uncertain.
And I get it! Admitting uncertainty means committing a modern-day social faux-pas: looking ignorant. No one likes to feel dumb. No one likes to be thought of as stupid. But uncertainty is vital for critical thinking. It is a necessary ingredient in curiosity. It is the rootbed of intellectual humility. Saying “I don’t know” is part of noticing what glints! Being uncertain is the motivation for staying open to shiny new ideas, images, connections! It is the reason we look.
A developing question: is uncertainty the reason why we seek sensory input? What is the role of the senses in the experience of uncertainty?
So what glints for me? Things that I don’t know about. Things that change, warp, amend, complicate the things that I thought I already knew. Things that raise new questions. Things that highlight additional uncertainty. These things don’t just spark joy, though they often do that; they also spark some discomfort.
A developing question: how else can discomfort be joyful? Or are they incompatible?
I’ve included several developing questions as they arose throughout my writing process. Writing can sometimes be misunderstood as the communication of knowledge. I think it can do that, but I also think it has the potential to convey the lack of knowledge, the development of uncertainty. It can communicate un-knowledge, if you will. I hope to continue sharing my un-knowledge with you as I open my attention to being captured.