When author Margaret D. McGee moved with her husband David into a house in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula, she started keeping a nature journal. As she formed the practice of writing short entries a few times a week, she realized that paying attention to nature outside her house was beginning to change her life:

4 May.
Salmonberry bloom almost finished; a single magenta blossom left in the middle of a row of hard, green berries fuzzed with pink hairs.

Creating a reason to get close enough to touch, smell, and, if possible, taste what she was observing and describing did more than help Margaret create the “treasure chest” she expected “to plunder for season-specific details” in her writing. She soon discovered the impact of nature journaling on her “prayer life.”

Coming from the Episcopal tradition and experience journaling, Margaret began work on Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment, a book she describes as being a “short book that took a long time to write.” Appealingly organized according to the particular reflections encouraged by the Liturgical Calendar of Advent, Christmas Season, Epiphany, Lent, Easter Season, Pentecost Sunday, and Ordinary Time, the book offers easy-to-follow, life-changing, introspective exercises for paying the kind of close attention that puts us in touch with ourselves and everything to which we are connected.

Margaret advises us that:

One moment of attention turns into a prayer of power and intimacy. It is a way of prayer that can be done anytime, anywhere, as part of any activity. It has two steps.

Slow down.
Pay attention.

The author supplies short personal narratives about events in her life and in the lives of her friends and family that helped her perceive and embody specific qualities of the spiritual in her everyday life. In each chapter of this slender, powerful book, Margaret moves from a narrative she has selected to match the tone and mood of particular seasons on the Liturgical calendar to life questions she raises to herself based on the narratives and the season to ways to reflect on those questions as they appear in one’s own life. Each chapter includes scripture readings that help the reader reflect on the nature of existence raised in the chapter’s narrative and exercises Margaret has created to help readers have self-reflective experience.

 As Margaret wrote in her journal, she also began drawing her nature subjects. Drawing was new to her and making the sketches in her journal nurtured her observational powers and her commitment to the value of observing. In her book, she demonstrates how she lives her spiritual practice providing readers with an elegant, mindful guide to achieving understanding and connection. Writer-readers will recognize the path Margaret describes and build their own confidence in the value of taking on the most important aspect of writing–paying attention as an act of love.

In “Leap of Faith,” Chapter Two of Sacred Attention, written for the Christmas season, Margaret tells the story of when she first decided to draw the parts of nature she had been observing. She was, she says, “absurdly happy” at the way the process of drawing taught her a new way of looking. She decided to make her husband David a birthday card that December with a drawing of a Nootka rose branch. She laid the branch on the paper and traced where the twigs came out and the “four fat rose hips that hung from their tips.”  She thought about the red buds she saw between the plant’s thorns this way:

In the spring these buds would unfurl into new leaves like toddlers taking their first steps. Now they were still wrapped in their swaddling clothes, newborn in the long, cold nights of December.

She goes on to draw individual leaves:

millions of leaves are made by God and aged by God. For a moment of time, I had given my full and respectful attention to just one. Each leaf spoke God’s word. Drawing it, I made my reply. In return God shared with me the wonders and joy of creation.

She prays:

Dear God
I am filed with expectations,
and you are never what I expect.
By your grace may I hold my expectations
lightly, in the open palm of my hand,
for the breath of your Spirit to lift and
blow them wherever you will.
Amen.

And then she asks us to ask ourselves:

• What in your life gets most of your attention?
• What brings you the most joy?
• What’s the most surprising piece of your life right now?

The scripture readings she selects for this chapter are about Sarah, who in her 90s, hears from God that she will bear Abraham a son. (Genesis 18: 9-15 and Genesis 21:1-7)

“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” Sarah asks in the verses.

Jumping from the greatness of bearing children to the exquisite nature of a common object, Margaret asks that we find a small stone and with words or crayons describe it completely.  She says to wait and keep looking, to work for at least ten minutes even if we think we have seen everything we can describe:

Walk away and come back and continue if you want.  Highlight what did not show itself till near the end.

What might God say, she asks, if God were talking to you through the stone?

Everything we see, hear, taste, touch and feel is part of Creation. Whatever voice we can give to what we focus on will provide riches. For there isn’t anything too wonderful or anything that is not wonderful enough for us to appreciate greatly. That is a secret writers have discovered as have all who follow sacred paths.

This season, whether you are opening gifts under a tree or lighting a menorah or savoring parties and festive meals that light the dark evenings of winter, try Margaret’s Christmas Season exercise. Taking time with a simple stone will help you find the new child in you, the child whose hope and sense of wonder allow her to observe without judgment. Then whether you ask what God is saying through the stone or what the stone itself is saying to you, as you write from the exercise, you will lose yourself. Concentrating on the stone and then on the conversation you are creating, you will experience again the  marvelous gift of insight that comes after close observation. You will be writing at one with your subject.

 ****

Work by Margaret McGee Available on the Internet:

An excerpt from Sacred Attention is on Amazon.com. It contains an extraordinary story and is at this link as well.

Another of Margaret’s writings on Christmas appears on her website,  In The Courtyard.

“With Apologies to Dana Carvey” posted Episcopal Life Online contains ruminations on church ladies — fanciful, real, and future.