“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”

Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations and past experience. “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote about the science of looking. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier about the art of seeing.

It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work.

The best apprenticeship I know is spending time in nature, there amid the ceaseless quivering of phenomena and quickening of aliveness, the deep stillnesses and broad silences, all the dazzling othernesses with their myriad occasions for unselfing. The second best is poet Lia Purpura’s magnificent essay collection On Looking (public library) — an invitation to see the world whole by apprehending its details and the dialogue between them: church spires and glaciers and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the wings of the house fly “gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries,” the late-afternoon light silvering the sardines in the open can. What emerges is a reckoning with the way “events crosshatch” and “particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble,” so that “the moments go layering up” to stratify life into the shape of being.

Purpura writes:

If looking… is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.

[…]

I never thought to say, or call this “God,” which even then sounded like shorthand, a refusal to be speechless in the face of occurrences, shapes, gestures happening daily, and daily reconstituting sight. “God,” the very attitude of the word — for the lives of words were also palpable to me — was pushy. Impatient. Quantifiable. A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly here.

To concentrate attention in an act of noticing is to consecrate this here — a way of blessing our own lives.

Purpura considers the consecration:

It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.

Shows we’re in use.

Uses us.

Right now.

Right this minute.

Anything we notice, then, becomes a pinhole through which the whole universe rushes in — but only if we open the valve of fear and preconception. A century after poet H.D. anchored her ravishing metaphor for how we see in a jellyfish, Purpura writes:

There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass — and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating… In order to see their particular beauty, to see them, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.

Then there is the night itself, in the smallest patch of which Purpura finds evidence that “every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal.”

Scraps of matter, scraps of time, filigrees of flesh — these are the constituents of our lives. We see with the mind, but it is the body that does the looking. To notice is to orient the body to the world, to turn matter over on the tongue of the mind until, like a koan, it releases its meaning. And since time is the substance we are made of, to notice things is also, inevitably, to notice time — “the loops of years pierced and containing the point.” When a storm domes her neighborhood in a particular darkness that transports her to the storms of her childhood, Purpura observes:

What it is — is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.

What it is — is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street — not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid — but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind — and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.

These Möbius moments of time folding in on itself often feel significant, sign-like — and yet they betoken the difference between signs and omens, living reminders that meaning does not inhere in the world but in the stories we tell ourselves about it. Purpura writes:

These moments of recurrence/concurrence are not messages fluttering toward, bearing secrets, but stories in which we are part of the telling. We are, for a spell, of the path where shape forms, where flux assembles, briefly, a center. And there are so many centers.

“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote a quarter millennium earlier in his refutation of time. And if Muriel Rukeyser, who was right about so much, was right that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” we are the makers of the moment with the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be alive.

On the first anniversary of a significant death, paging through a catalogue of model houses while thinking about Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” Purpura writes:

I keep coming back to this spot of green. That’s all, just the green, which, above all, holds me. It’s of ripe avocados and hard young apples. Thin-skinned lake plants, as they float, cloud and wave. A curl of lime peel. New moss. Peridot, milked down with light. This simple-flat, sad-tender green, suspended against the broom-swept cirrus sky… Of all the green I make a stillness. Of sun-through-leaves, now, this June, I make a stillness. Of all the green, transparent spots I make a moment.

A century after Virginia Woolf located the art of presence in those “moments of being” that make you who you are, Purpura touches the beating heart of one such moment:

The end of the day swells like a breaker, holds itself curled against the green field. Keeps itself brief above the grasses. Keeps itself sheer before it falls. Now in the half-light above the field, the day is something vanished-but-present, or present-but-going. A crest then a wobble, hovering.

“Into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen,” Jane Kenyon wrote in one of my favorite poems. It is the falling we are here to notice in the half-light between never before and never again.