Pay attention to the moon

I spent almost an hour this morning watching the moon glide slowly into the arms of these two trees, and I could begin, almost, as it gathered speed, to feel that it was the earth -- my home, my dining room window, not the moon -- that was sliding inexorably forward through space...

Simone Weil once said "Absolute attention is prayer," and I'd like to think that's true, but not in the traditional sense of addressing hopes to some distant being.  I think it's more like what my camera has taught me; that if, as May Sarton says in Journal of a Solitude, we look long enough at something,  with absolute attention "something like revelation takes place.  Something is 'given,' and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self." 

"We are aware of God," she goes on to say, "only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing self in admiration and joy."