“Even now, I wonder at the steepness of my focus.” -Louise Erdrich, The Round House, p. 2

                I’ve been sitting with this description of focus as landscape. As topology, a hill rising up to a hilltop of shaded trees, or a ridge falling away in boulders to the distant ribbon of a twilight creek, water bright as sky. They carry my thoughts, these slopes. Maybe they carry all of us. 
                It’s such a different conceptualization than pay attention. Little flashing coins of time, of focus, stuffed into a purse and dripped out toward productive or meaningless pursuits. Such a different conceptualization than I’ve been trying to focus. Me standing over myself, a strict disciplinarian and a frustrated child, the taller me tapping the problem that I’m supposed to be thinking about, watchful for any sign that I’m looking out the window or swinging my feet. Except I’m both.
                Outside the rain of my thoughts sluices off the roof. Runs down through fields and streets until it finds a steep slope, and hurtles down toward what it can’t avoid. Or even, maybe, toward where it needs to be.