Nobody sees a flower really. To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
Georgia O'Keeffe would have been 129 today. Best known for her paintings, she is also remembered for terse poetic lines including the one above. Georgia reminds us of the heart of spirituality — always and ever to pay attention. Attention is a warp thread in the weave of both seeing and friendship. Paying attention is a slow process. It isn't efficient, never meeting strict production goals.
Georgia paid profound attention to her adopted New Mexico landscape in and around Abiquiu where she lived full time the last thirty-nine years of her long life. High desert light, hills, clouds, the river, cottonwoods, dry waterfalls, her iconic bones, and the flinty Pedernal all captured her attention. She said that God would give her Pedernal if she painted it enough. In fact the intensity of her attention resulted in an intimacy with her surroundings that can still be felt thirty years after her death. When I was training as a spiritual director, my five residential weeks were at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, one casa down the road from where Georgia painted in the summer. In that harsh, ever-changing beauty, her spirit hovers like a living presence.
It isn't necessary for us to paint if we would take seriously her example of daily listening to the land we inhabit. We can make the choice to befriend the place where we are, to take the time to know it beneath the surface. All that is around us has a voice. If we tend to be in a hurry, are distracted, or can't put down our electronic devices, such voices will go unheard by us. Try ten minutes, an hour, or a day paying attention as Georgia did.
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