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How much of love is walking to some edge and imagining another? When bell hooks talk about love as action, she does so to demystify what so many seek but are unable to name. Rather than an unplaceable feeling, love is locatable as an action of care.

Elizabeth Povinelli: Every location is unlocatable except as a focus of habituated attention.

If attention is what brings place into being, is it the same place that’s brought into being when me and you become we? Togetherness is made through an us and an outside. I mean, is it the same coming into focus that is predicated on a closing off? The vibrating edges of perception knocked out by a pair of thick framed glasses and what’s possible to speak of. Attention is the turning toward that’s also the turning away.

Simone Weil: Attention, taken to the highest degree, is prayer.

I’ve thought the same for writing, walking a page to say the same thing, hands working the plastic over and over to make something else out of the same breaking. Months ago there was an exercise to listen to the bird calls in your neighborhood. And when there’s nothing to hear, notice in the silence where the mind goes to.

To acknowledge that we all die, Ross Gay says, to acknowledge that we all die softens us.