“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
—Marcel Proust
I write what comes to me. This simple fact shapes everything here. Not a system imposed but a practice of availability—walking the Barri Gòtic, waiting in airport lounges, catching the metro after rehearsal. Like Cartier-Bresson knew: life happens outside, in movement, in the decisive moment when attention and world coincide. The semantic types that organize this site emerged from noticing, after years of this practice, that attention arrives in recognizable qualities.
Like cloud formations that have names not because we command them but because we’ve learned to recognize their shapes, these post types are descriptive, not prescriptive. They help name what has already moved through.
The Practice of Availability
Before categories, before types, there is only this: staying available to what arrives. Sometimes at the morning desk with coffee and northeast light. More often in movement—the ten-minute walk between metro and rehearsal, the pause while tuning, the particular quality of attention that comes after three hours of Bach.
What Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” applies to more than photography. It’s that alignment of inner and outer, when what you’ve been carrying suddenly finds its form in what you’re seeing. The heliotrope man wasn’t sought—he was encountered, recognized, received.
This isn’t mystical, though mystery participates. It’s the practice of keeping the channels clear, staying porous to what Cage knew about attention: it’s not about controlling what you notice but noticing what you notice.
The semantic types emerged from asking, after writing: What quality of attention moved through me here? Was I looking outward or inward? Was I building or discovering? Was I documenting or transforming?
The Qualities of Looking
Observation
The practice of external attention
The eye rests on surfaces—a man sunbathing on Rue de Petit Musc, light through stained glass, the particular way someone holds their coffee cup. No interpretation, just presence. What Berger called “the act of seeing comes before words.”
These pieces stay in present tense, honoring immediacy. They trust that patient attention to the ordinary reveals the extraordinary. Like the heliotrope man who became, simply through being seen, a meditation on our fundamental nature as creatures who turn toward light.
Fragment
What arrives incomplete
Not everything wants to be whole. Some thoughts are more truthful at three lines than three pages. Fragments honor the partial, the glancing, the not-yet-formed. They resist the violence of forced completion.
Often in italics, often brief, they mark places where attention touched down but didn’t settle. Like archaeological shards, they suggest larger wholes without claiming to be them.
Pattern
Recognition across time
When the same form appears in different contexts—the spiral in the shell and the galaxy, the teacher’s gesture that echoes across generations—pattern recognition begins. These pieces map recurring structures, seeking what Alexander calls “the quality without a name.”
Pattern names appear in small caps, marking them as technical terms in a developing language. Each pattern is both specific instance and general principle.
Essay
Sustained architectural thinking
Sometimes attention wants to build. Not just observe but construct—laying foundations, raising walls, creating rooms others can inhabit. Essays begin with drop caps, signaling substantial engagement ahead.
The essay doesn’t wander (that’s meditation’s gift) but moves with purpose. It makes claims, offers evidence, builds toward… not conclusions exactly, but temporary resting places. Lookouts from which to see farther.
Meditation
The inward spiral
Where observation looks out, meditation turns in. Not narcissism but the recognition that inner and outer reflect each other. The personal becomes universal through specificity, not abstraction.
These pieces often combine with essay form—the architectural drive enriched by contemplative depth. They move in spirals rather than lines, returning to the same point at different altitudes.
Gloss
Marginalia made text
Reading as conversation. These pieces think alongside other texts, in the margins, between the lines. They honor the tradition of manuscript annotation while recognizing that sometimes the marginal note contains the essential insight.
Formatted as whispers, they acknowledge their dependent relationship to primary texts while claiming their own space.
Correspondence
Direct address
Letters, even public ones, create different intimacy. The “you” is specific, even when published. These pieces maintain epistolary attention—the quality of writing to one reader as if they were the only reader.
Offering
Curatorial attention
Sometimes the gift is not creating but gathering. These pieces collect—quotes, links, images, sounds—with the attention of someone arranging flowers. Not comprehensive but composed. Each element chosen for how it converses with the others.
Performance
Where technical meets spiritual
Writing about music, teaching, or any embodied practice requires particular attention. How do you convey the feeling of bow meeting string? The moment when a student suddenly understands?
These pieces braid technical precision with lived experience, refusing the false divide between craft and meaning.
Teaching
Attention to another’s learning
Different from performance, teaching pieces focus on the student’s journey rather than the teacher’s knowledge. They document the emergence of understanding, which rarely follows the path we plan.
Interlude
Seasonal and threshold
Between major movements, music offers interludes—not lesser but different. These pieces mark transitions, seasons, the space between what was and what’s becoming. Often brief, always temporary.
Glimpse
The decisive moment
When the camera becomes an extension of attention—the fleeting instant captured in passing, accompanied by minimal commentary. Neither more nor less than observation, but immediate, visual, caught rather than composed. Like Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment: when all elements align in one frame.
Photo Essay
Sequential visual narrative
When images and text interrogate each other across time, building meaning through accumulation and the spaces between frames. Following the tradition of Mohr and Berger: photographs asking questions words cannot answer, text providing context images lack. The conversation between seeing and understanding.
The Modifiers
encounter: true
When the world stops
Sometimes a simple observation cracks open into something larger. The ordinary moment becomes threshold. What Castaneda called “stopping the world”—when habitual perception breaks and energy shows itself directly.
Posts marked with encounter: true carry the ✦ symbol and extra breathing room. They document those moments when attention itself was transformed by what it attended to.
chamber: true
Collective wisdom applied
Certain texts require more than solitary revision. They undergo review by an inter-temporal chamber—voices across centuries examining surface and depth equally.
Posts marked with chamber: true bear the ⟐ seal—the journey ornament opened through examination. They’ve been unmade and remade in witnessed space.
Not a System but a Recognition
These types don’t prescribe how to write but help recognize what was written. Like musical modes that exist whether or not we name them, these qualities of attention move through anyone who sits still long enough to notice.
The practice isn’t choosing a type before writing. It’s writing what comes, then asking: What quality of attention does this require from a reader? What kind of presence does it invite?
Sometimes pieces refuse single categories. An observation becomes meditation becomes encounter. An essay opens into correspondence. The types blend and blur because attention itself is fluid.
An Invitation
This taxonomy exists not to constrain but to clarify. When you see a post marked “observation,” you know it asks for external attention, present-tense awareness. When you see “meditation,” prepare for spirals rather than straight lines.
But more than navigation, these types are invitations into practice. Can you read an observation with the same quality of attention that wrote it? Can you follow a meditation’s spiral without rushing toward conclusions?
The semantic types teach both writer and reader: attention is multiple, generous, surprising. What we bring to the page shapes what we find there.
In the end, there’s only this: We write what comes to us. We read with the attention the work requires. In between, sometimes, the extraordinary reveals itself as having been here all along.
Continue exploring:
Primary Types: Observations · Essays · Meditations · Patterns · Fragments
Visual Forms: Glimpses · Photo Essays
Specialized Forms: Glosses · Correspondences · Offerings · Performances · Teachings · Interludes
Transformative: Encounters · Council Reviewed