Image: Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” famously wrote Simone Weil. A French nearly-Catholic mystic whose body of short-form writing was largely published posthumously, including in the book Waiting for God, Weil focused intensely on the concept of attention, convinced careful attention was the “substance” of love of God and of neighbour. To bestow such attention, especially on someone who is suffering, is “very rare and difficult,” wrote Weil. It requires us to relinquish our ego and allow that there are other “centers” in this universe, others with internal worlds as powerful as our own.

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“I’m scared of bunyips.”

“Seriously?”

They went north, crunching gravel, and hoped they found the pale blue Nissan Skyline before dark.

They heard the ute stone-rolling from the south before they saw it.

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“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” ~Wittgenstein.

Raised on an imaginative diet of four-seasoned woods, solid-walled houses and cloaked, clear-speaking heroes, I’d managed to overlay such scenes onto our old home of Melbourne… but they made no sense here.

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