The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain – the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phases it, “unutterably alone.”
More than anything else, attention is the act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things – quite by accident.
When my first marriage blew apart, I took a lonely house in the Hollywood Hills.
My plan was simple. I would weather my loss my loss alone. I would see no one, and no one would see me, until the worst of the pain was over.
I would take long, solitary walks, and I would suffer. As it happened, I did take those walks, but they did not go as planned.
Two curves up the road behind my house, I met a gray striped cat.
This cat lived in a vivid blue house with a large sheepdog she clearly disliked. I learned all this despite myself in a week’s walking.
We began to have little visits, that cat and I, and then long talks of all we had in common, lonely women.
Both of us admired an extravagant salmon rose that had wandered across a neighboring fence. Both of us like watching the lavender float of jacaranda blossoms as they shook loose from their moorings.
Alice (I heard her called inside one after afternoon) would bat at them with her paw.
By the time the jacarandas were done, an unattractive slatted fence had been added to contain the rose garden. By then, I had extended my walks a mile farther up and added to my fellowship other cats, dogs, and children.
By the time the salmon rose disappeared behind its fence, I had found a house higher up with a walled Moorish garden and a vitriolic parrot I grew fond of. Colorful, opinionated, highly dramatic, he reminded me of my ex-husband.
Pain had become something more valuable: experience.
Julia Cameron
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