Awareness. Is awareness one
of the ten values I will name preparing for my Bat
Mitzvah? The word feels strange on my tongue. Aware meaning cognizant, conscious,
alert. Ness, a suffix attached to an adjective or a participle to form an
abstract noun that denotes a quality or a state. Such as: goodness, kindness,
darkness. A synonym of awareness is mindful; an antonym, oblivious.
Last
Friday, before the snow that fell over the weekend, I drove home, pulled into
the garage, and as I stepped into the kitchen, Dick said, “How do you like your
fields?”
He’s
like that. No hello. A quick question. After all these years, I still can’t
take a breath. I blurt. “What fields?”
“Out
by the driveway. Didn’t you notice them?”
I’d
asked to have those fields cut down at the end of summer, but neither Paul nor
Matt, the two men who run the lawn crew had managed to get the job done. Then,
Matt had a stroke, and the fields became unimportant. I figured someone on the
crew would cut them down in the spring. But Paul arrived. Probably, he’d listened
to the weather report. I hooked the dogs to their leashes and walked outside.
Tall stalks of dried grass lay on the ground like pick up sticks, small birds
foraging.
To
be aware. To notice. To take in. That’s my job as a writer. So why, when I’m
not in my writing space—space being both a state of mind and a place—do I check
out? Because awareness is hard. To be present, cognizant, conscious, alert. That
is one edge of the knife blade for a writer. The other is a kind of drifting
inside that space, what I call space around the space.
But
back to my drive along the driveway. What had I been doing inside my car?
Listening to a C D of George Eliot’s Middlemarch,
a book I’ve wanted to reread for years, and knew I never would, so I borrowed
the tapes from the library. My attention was focused on listening and on
watching where I was going. Perhaps, awareness is inward as well as outward, a
sifting of stimuli. And what of complete inattention, a moment last summer,
sitting on a weathered wooden bench at the edge of the sea, dogs at my feet,
the scent of salt, the squawk of gulls, my mind as open as the sky? Perhaps,
that, too, is awareness.
Still
that word, awareness, chafes. Is sentience my word? An online dictionary
defines sentience: feeling or sensation
as distinguished from perception or thought. No, that doesn’t work either.
Perhaps what I value is sentient awareness, a place where unknowing and knowing
intertwine.
