Self-Directed Sacredness

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

There’s a radical power in deciding for yourself who and what deserves reverence.

Not what anyone else says matters. Not what productivity culture demands you optimise. Not what social media algorithms push you to consume.

What YOU say is sacred.

I am treating my heart and mind with some care in the mornings by adding reading a poem to my routine. And since I have pretty well everything Mary Oliver has written, I am working my way through the delights that spilled from her own heart and mind. This morning it was “The Dipper”

It brought tears to my eyes, as her work so often does. She was able to capture feeling so well in what often feels like a language almost incapable of describing the truth, the scope, of the beauty that surrounds us. Even beauty does not describe beauty adequately.

She meets a Dipper (bird), who is living their most authentic life, doing just as their name describes. She shapeshifts by listening and watching, “into his frame of mind, catching everything I could in the tone, cadence, sweetness, and briskness of how affirmative report. Though not by words, it was a more than satisfactory way to the bridge of understanding”.

And then she speaks of revisiting that moment in time often, more than half her life, more than half a century later, and how it is still as meaningful then, though the Dipper themself is long gone, “sleeping for decades in the leaves beside the stream, his crumble of white bones, his curl of flesh, comfortable even so.”

In her essay, “Upstream”, she finishes with “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

This is my devotion - sketching wild beings and wild life and wildness. This is my attention, and attention, and attention. I want to be completely in a moment. I want to be in my wild life. I want to remember and come back to that wild life, just as Mary did with that momentary but profound moment of attention and devotion to Dipper.

And because I want to share the things I learn (and maybe it is selfish, but I want to do the learning and the doing with others who get excited about all of this too), I add them into Hedgerow or The Wild Sketchbook, or, if they feel like their own thing, make a course. And so I did, and even if I do say so myself, it is beautiful, it is empowering, and it matters - because the wild matters. The wild inside and out.

When you open your sketchbook and decide that this leaf matters, that this bird’s particular tilt of head deserves your full attention, that this quote speaks to how you want to move through the world - you’re practicing self-directed sacredness.

You get to choose what’s holy. You get to decide what deserves your time, your witness, your marks. You. Not the news. Not the endless scroll. Not the pressure to be productive or impressive or always improving.

This practice is an act of reclaiming your attention.

And in a world that profits from your distraction, from your anxiety, from keeping you small and scared and scrolling - choosing to pay attention to beauty, to small wild things, to your own noticing?

That’s resistance.

That’s revolution.

Self-directed sacredness means your sketchbook becomes a record of what YOU chose to hold as precious.

Not what you were told to value. Not what everyone else is paying attention to. But what called to YOUR heart. What made YOU pause. What YOUR wild self recognized as kin.

This is deeply personal work. Private work. Work that doesn’t need to be shared or validated or approved by anyone else.

You are engaged in a Creative Ecology Sketchbook Practice and you are creating a field guide to you. Your field guide is wholly and holy yours.

The marks you make, the creatures you witness, the words you weave - they’re evidence of what you’ve chosen to treat as sacred in your one wild and precious life.

And that matters.

Because how you spend your attention is how you spend your life.

And attention is the beginning of devotion.

Today I am going to weave some words around some feathers that I have kept and treasured for the connection to the being they belonged to. Tawny Frogmouth, Kookaburra, Australian Raven. They were here, close by. We probably passed each other - me on my walks, them flying high or pretending they were a branch. We certainly slept under the same sky, felt the same rain, the heat of the sun, the ferocious and delicate winds. We did not meet, but I know them, and I love them, and I am devoted to telling their stories in the most intentional and loving way that I can.

This is my devotional practice. Maybe it is yours too. Tell me a wild memory of yours, where you were completely present, attentional, devoted - I want to know about your wild world too.

With a big wild heart and a handful of strawberries,