On craft, and other slow things

I keep coming back to a small idea: that craft is just attention, repeated. Not talent, not taste exactly — attention, paid again and again until it becomes a way of seeing.

Design and writing teach me the same lesson from opposite ends. Design asks me to remove until only the necessary remains. Poetry asks me to add the one word that makes the necessary ache. Both are arguments about what deserves a person’s attention.

Music is the quiet third. It doesn’t explain itself, which is the part I trust most.

I don’t think these are separate practices. They are one practice, wearing different clothes depending on the day.