About Us

Learning to look. Looking to learn.

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

Marilynne Robinson

This blog is not a vanity project. We are attention seekers, yes. But not in the usual sense of the phrase. Rather, we are seekers of attention. Or, to be more precise, we are seekers of lost attention. 

I suspect we are not alone in our need for this work of recovery. In this age of “joyless urgency”, as Marilynne Robinson terms it, we are all victims of what the poet Gideon Heugh describes as a “mass theft of our attention”. It seems we no longer know how to stop and sit, to pause and to ponder.

Taking a lead from our children, who are experts in the art of wonder, we have decided to be intentional in our attention seeking. Our hope is that this blog will become something of a repository, a store cupboard, if you will, for the consequences of our attention (another phrase of Marilynne Robinson’s – she will crop up a lot!).

And so, if you are an aspiring attention seeker too, we hope you will join us as together we learn again how to look, so that by looking we might also learn.

Paul and Emma

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Attention Seekers