Peripheral Visions

possible to play that double recognition in tune with changing needs, to avoid the changes that reduce flexibility and the constancies that eat away at the necessities of survival. We know that keeping consumption at familiar levels is eventually going to deplete resources, yet patterns of consumption are oddly difficult to change. When change itself becomes addictive, it seems almost bound to lead to trouble, yet not all acquired habits of constant change are degenerative: constant learning, for instance, is not. A willingness to change in response to a new social environment can be a style of relating to the world throughout a lifetime. Yet the modern vulnerability to boredom may be the long-term result of an addiction to variation.
    When I first lived in Israel, less than ten years after independence, military preparedness was a short-term adaptation, but over time, as new generations grew up under arms, it seemed to become intrinsic to the structure of the state. What looked impressive then is worrying today, potentially replacing other constancies of Jewish identity and becoming an end in itself. Thoughtful Israelis today make a distinction between being able to fight for survival, as many of those who died in the holocaust were not, and risking addiction to militarism. There are positive side effects of this drug, for it works to promote solidarity and the maturity of young people—I sometimes wish all my freshman students had spent two years in the military—but there are negative side effects too, such as secrecy and sexism. When I returned to visit Israel, I found I was as concerned about constancies as I was about changes. Yet I could see other processes of change growing into new constancies, like the long-lived forests slowly created of trees planted one by one.

Attending a World
    T HE SOFT SOUND OF RAIN on the roof fades in and out of awareness, along with memories of tropical downpours and the celebration of rain in the desert, not one rain but many. There is a persistent scent of newly cut wood in the room, and the smoky smell of the wood fire, but I only notice these when I come in from outdoors. On my left is a window through which I can look downhill past lichen-covered oaks to a forking stream. How vivid the grays and greens of the lichens are in the rain, the wet bark blackened behind them. Two streams diverge in a…I wonder, in a pause between paragraphs, about the many meanings of water, and then how the metaphor of streams would shape our thoughts differently from the metaphor of roads. I muse on the rarity, in the Philippines, of metaphors of binary choice, so common in the West. I check my watch to make sure I don’t forget a planned telephone call. Somehow under the ripple of slight distraction, a sentence has taken shape, and I type it into the computer.
    It would not be true to say that I am concentrating fully on my writing. My attention is not something I control, not something I fully own, much less a resource from which I might dole out payments. Zen teachers urge students not to struggle against distraction but rather to let the thoughts that come during meditation pass through their awareness, then let them go. When I was in college, I knew a woman who kept fresh apples in her desk drawer so that instead of being restless as she worked she would have the minor distraction of their scent to notice and relinquish. At one time I used smoking the same way, finding a portion of attention easier to focus than the whole.
    When I become restless and my thoughts no longer flow to my fingertips, I take my big yellow dog for a long ramble through the wet woods, rebuild the fire, do chores and errands, and then pick up where I left off, to find that my unconscious has made headway in the interval. During most of my life, except for the short periods away in places like the MacDowell Colony, my writing has been fitted in between other kinds of activities. Now this is so much a part of my pattern that when I am guaranteed against interruption I create my own distractions as a counterpoint to the working day.
    This is one of many styles of working, a common style for women who have spent years with one ear open for the cry of an awakened child, the knock of someone making a delivery, the smell of burning that warns that a soup left to simmer slowly has somehow boiled dry. My life has forced me to adopt multiple levels of focus, shifting back and forth and embedding one activity within the