on attention, devotion, and love

attention is devotion. the act of turning off my phone, of turning to you and listening, with my ears open and my eyes fixated squarely on you - to me, it feels like healing. it evokes a feeling like listening to an album for the first time and it sounding like nostalgia, like taking in a deep breath of winter air and expelling all of the dirt from your lungs. it feels like waste and hesitation and indecision leaving my body in a big shudder. when i shudder, it sends waves of cold from my shoulders down to my wrists, then from my shoulders down my back. and it feels uncomfortable after spending so long in a vaguely warm haze, spending so long thinking about things that i want to do but never doing them. i suppose there are many things that i cannot do at the moment because i don't have the tools to do them. but when i exhale and spread the chill throughout my body i know that, for now, i have become someone. in that moment, i’m not the mess of everything that i want to do and be, jumbled up into an indecipherable maze of wishes that can never be fulfilled. i find that i am far too busy wishing to have any of my wishes fulfilled. maybe an airport is not the place to spring my dreams of making music into action, when i have no instruments nor software to learn, but i listened to so much new music today and it inspired me. this inspiration has nowhere to go and sits within me and my soul cries for it to manifest in any way possible, while it’s there. my body knows that the inspiration will soon leave and the dull warmth will seep back into my bones. i find myself often inspired, but stuck in a place where i cannot act on it. perhaps this is one of the true evils of the work schedule that we all find ourselves in. we know that work robs us of our time and labor and energy and saps our ability to build community and maintain ourselves. but it also robs me of much of my ability to interact with the world around me in the way that i find myself wanting to. maybe dreaming is not the evil i might have made it out to be in the recent past. but even so, i think i want to put something into the world whenever my heart is gripped by something that inspires me. something, anything - not just in the form that i think about, but in any way that would satisfy me. and if attention is devotion - in the way that the soft strokes of my hand on her head are, or the melting properties of her gaze into mine are - then perhaps i was right all along, since that day in ramona’s apartment where i spoke to a kindred spirit for hours on end of desire. my desire was to be wanted and longed for, but now i also realize that i want to want. but i want to want deeply and not just wish for all of the things that i’m not able to have right now. the very act of being attentive is devotion, and to be attentive is to fixate all of yourself on one subject. those moments happen so rarely for me, when no barriers of self-consciousness and fear lie between us and my soul feels like it’s touching yours. when the meteor shower comes, i want there to be nothing in the world except us two. maybe this is why i feel that so many of my friendships can feel romantic at times. when i am fully with you, and you are fully with me, it feels as though my hand is pressing gently on yours and we think about kissing because we’ve rarely ever known what it’s like to have someone's undivided attention. it feels like sparks fly, and i wonder if this is what everyone else perceives as love. perhaps we could all fall in love all the time with so many people if we just put our damn phones away. perhaps love is what arises when people are so enamored with each other that there is nothing in the world that they would rather be doing. nothing else they would rather pay attention to. perhaps there are far too many things to do now - so much so that it feels like nothing captivates me enough to retain my interest. my brain is being fed dopamine through a tube and yet i am not happy, just placated. in a world where everything is competing for my rapidly shrinking attention span, meeting your gaze lights my soul ablaze again. i am in love with you if you are here with me, and i will always do my best to be here with you. in this world of shrieking voices and deafening noise, i pray that you are my moment of silence. i want to offer everything i have to you - and all that i have that matters is not the money in my bank account or my material possessions or even anything i've built. no, the only thing i have, and the only thing i want to give to you, is my attention. because my attention is my devotion, and when i choose to devote myself to you, i understand why the religious pray. perhaps i am not as secular as i once thought, after leaving the church when i was 12. when i close my eyes and think deeply about you, it feels as though i am speaking directly with god, just as it did when i believed in god as a child. but god is and will never be a supreme being. no, to me, god is the act of loving anything at all as deeply as i can. i would like to put my whole heart into everything i do. being present was the first step of this. sometimes, things are so far away i could never ever be present with them. and in the future, i could be present with something in front of me, or i could be present with my longing. whenever i am present with my longing, i will probably write entries like this. to sit with it and feel it in its entirety, to block out all of the distraction and noise in front of me. people have said this in so many different ways over the years, but i think i’m starting to understand what they meant. be present. make the most of your life. follow your heart. follow your dreams. it's funny that people's sayings mean absolutely nothing to me most of the time, but having reached it now, i realize that those words will never be enough to make people understand the depth of everything i’ve been through to get here. those words of advice are always such a rough framework condensed into such a short sentence, and it conveys nothing of how to do it. maybe i can write more about this if you'd like to read it. maybe i would like to figure out what i should devote myself to at any given time. maybe i can talk about the simple act of listening being love in its deepest form, if you asked. because for you, i would do so many things.