Affectionate Attention

Richard Schiffman is a poet and environmental journalist based in New York. He is a global traveler, but he has learned that the value of a journey is not found in the distance that we cover, but in how deeply we focus on where we find ourselves. As an example, he recounts the experiences of six-graders from Los Angeles who traveled just a few miles up into the San Gabriel Mountains and were awestruck by the beauty of nature. One girl was astonished “by the crunch of freshly crusted snow. She had never seen snow before, still less the sound of walking on it.” 

Some people call this “mindfulness” or “being present”, but Schiffman uses the term “affectionate attention”, and he says it has never been more needed than it is today.  As an environmental reporter, he writes about regulations and technology that may help address the ecological woes of our world. And he believes these approaches are important to a sustainable future. But “the real problem”, he is growing to suspect, “is that we don’t love the world enough. We don’t love it, in large part, because we don’t see it. We don’t see it because we are not paying attention.”

​At True Hope Travel, we love creation as a reflection of our creator.  And we regularly see the hand of God in the many remarkable landscapes that we visit, as well as in the faces and voices of the many remarkable people we meet. But in order to capture the spirit of God during our pilgrim journeys around the world, we need to attune our eyes to see God and our ears to hear God in our daily lives. Have we said this before? Yes. Will we say it again? Yes, because it’s important. When we practice such affectionate attention, as Schiffman calls it, we are preparing ourselves to receive so much more from the trips that we so look forward to taking. And we pray the same for you.​

(To read more of Richard Schiffman’s thoughts about the spirit of travel in our daily lives, visit Yes magazine: https://issues.yesmagazine.org/issue/radical-travel/theme.html#9thArticle.)