One April morning, twenty-five years ago, I found myself speaking with an elderly Irish farmer in his newly ploughed field. At the time I was living in County Monaghan, a rural midland county on the border with Northern Ireland. Prior to coming to Ireland, I had been reading the poems of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), who grew up on a farm in Monaghan and felt confined by the “black hills” of his native landscape. At the age of thirty-four Kavanagh left the family farm for Dublin and went on to become the most influential Irish poet of his time. The Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has acknowledged his debt to Kavanagh’s work.
“I knew Paddy,” the farmer told me, leaning on his spade. “His father was a shoemaker. His mother couldn’t read or write. His fields were up there, over that hill. Paddy kept his books in his fence—in between the stones. I’d see him reading there for hours at a time. He was not a good farmer, not good at all. He paid no heed to his fields.” As if to clinch the point, he drove his spade forcefully into the soil.
He paid no heed to his fields. What struck me about that comment was not so much its content as the farmer’s choice of words, particularly the word heed, which seemed to have come from an earlier century. The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines heed as “careful attention, care, observation, regard” and notes that its usage is “now chiefly literary.” Forty years on, at least in North America, it is rare to find the word on the page, much less in conversation. Heed has gone the way of the corset, the rotary dial phone, and my father’s Royal Empress typewriter.
In formal, literary usage the noun heed is most often the object of the verb take. “Take heed, my dear,” wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1689, “time flies apace.” More rarely, heed serves as the object of the verb pay, which has a rather different connotation. To take heed is to take note of, to grasp the significance of a thing or event or situation. But to pay heed is to extend oneself: to offer care and respect to the object of attention. Like its distant cousin “paying homage,” paying heed may be an act of duty, but it can also be an act of generosity, requiring an expense of effort in the service of something or someone other than oneself.
Defined in that way, the act of paying heed has much in common with the practice of Zen. “Attention, attention, attention,” wrote the poet and Zen master Ikkyu (1394-1481), when asked to define the essence of the practice. To follow the way of Zen is to pay sustained attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us, in the present moment. Beyond that, it is to bring a particular quality of attention to things as they are: an intimate, inquisitive attention to whatever we encounter. Ideally, that attention is both wholehearted and continuous. From moment to moment, we pay heed to the world and to our lives.
Yet, as the Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays reminds us, few of us live up to that ideal. Preoccupied with the past, the future, and our abstract thoughts, we habitually ignore the present moment. In her book How to Train a Wild Elephant, Bays proposes a counter-measure, which can serve to awaken us from our reveries. Periodically throughout the day, she suggests, we can ask ourselves the question, “What am I ignoring?” By so doing, we can attenuate our inner monologue and open our awareness to our surroundings:
Ignoring the countless sights, sensations, and sounds that impinge on our eyes, skin, and ears may be essential when we need to focus on getting tasks done, such as reading a book before an exam, writing a sensitive e-mail, or getting a high score on a video game, but all that sensory blocking takes energy. When we are able to let go of those invisible shields and open our awareness to all that surrounds us, it is like stepping out of a cramped, musty room and finding ourselves in a large alpine meadow.*
An antidote to excessive cogitation, this exercise is also a way of cultivating appreciation for our lives. Ceasing to ignore our sensory field, we avail ourselves of its spaciousness and beauty.
There is often wisdom in archaic phrases. Like the sayings of the elders, such phrases preserve vanishing perspectives: ways of seeing that have left or are leaving the world. It is fair to say that in a world of ubiquitous mobile devices and obsessive connectivity, the act of paying heed, like the phrase used to describe it, is itself endangered, if not already going extinct. In a culture enamored of its entertainments, Zen practice can help us return to our actual lives. In a world rife with distractions, it can help us pay heed to our fields.
* Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant (Shambhala, 2011), Kindle edition, 151.
Photo by Oliver Dixon