Alexa Mergen's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-midnight-fox"
Beauty & Attention
"Seeing something beautiful always made me feel good."
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
