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Kristie waxes poetic:

to grasp the light
and hold it tight
extinguishes
the burning bright

and if I had no thing
to share
but bare
my heart
and willing,

tear the veil from my delusions;

then surely I have wandered through
the darkened wood
i shares with you;

and though the
heralds
bliss proclaim
and darkness,
sadness,
do disdain

still purely held
in open arms
I yield my faults to thee
that in the reaching, reaching,
through the harms,
sunlight comes to me;

and if I show you who I am,
and find solace in my bareness
then I have found the lighted path
and come to you in fairness.
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Andrew mused on a common English expression:

'Paying attention' is an odd phrase isn't it?
In English we don't give attention or make
attention as we might in other languages, we pay
it. Is it a payment of time to attention
(attention being the payee)? Or is it payment
of attention to the thing being attended to?
And what is purchased?
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Never at a loss for words, Gene responded:

In this context, the 'paying attention' is a
contraction of 'the paying of attention',
which is a contraction of the (archaic) 'paying-
out of attention', similar to the 'paying out'
of a rope by a sailor on a dock.

In this context, 'paying attention' does mean
exactly 'giving of attention'.

Our culture of expediency does strange things to
language. A similar example is the oft-used
'carrot and stick' metaphor; in popular parlance,
it is thought to mean to 'first offer a carrot
(inducement) and if that doesn't work, threaten
them with a stick'. The actual or original of
this now-distorted metaphor, is instead, '_the
carrot ON A stick_'. In this method of inducement,
the proffered carrot was dangled before the nose
of the mule or horse, who would then move toward
it. But because the driver, holding the carrot,
was pulled by the horse as it moved, the horse
never got a bite... only the tantalizing
possibility of the reward. The 'stick' part was
how the carrot was held, on a string, so far from
the driver. The stick was never used as a goad;
the vision of the reward was enough to draw
the horse forward. Sound familiar?

Time for another bar-b-que?
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Marcia submitted her thoughts:

Attention is real. It is a form of will. If I pay
attention to the already existing sensation in my
body I am adding something. Most of the time our
attention is just sucked out of us by consensus
reality. To be able to pay attention means a
certain level of awareness above the threshold of
sleeping man. It isn't really required. We can live
our entire lives as a sleeping person and never
consciously pay attention to anything. If you can
develop the ability to keep your attention and
actually pay it, you will receive much more than
you ever would have dreamed of (pun intended).
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