Attention requires a cultivated inner ground, not mere willpower

Evidence

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid to waste. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Thoreau’s mast-and-pigeons figure grounds Odell’s whole ecological-attention argument; ties to her bioregionalist method and to the Deep Listening tradition of treating attention as something nurtured.
• DEFINE: Establishes the organic, agrarian metaphor for inner life that the chapter’s ‘restoring the grounds for thought’ title rests on.