"Paying attention makes me feel alive."
Christine Tyler Hill on her analog newsletter project The Cloud Report
In the shop: cards and prints and all the reminders that yes, you have permission.
Hello friends,
What are we paying attention to?
This is a question I spend a lot of time thinking about. Attention isn’t a renewable resource because time isn’t a renewable resource. We only have so many hours in the day, we have to decide where our attention goes.
But as we all know, attention is easily strained. Pulled across channels and networks, co-opted and monetized, yanked in all kinds of directions, it barely feels like attention is ours anymore.
I am always drawn to artists who are finding a way to reclaim their attention, and in turn, help us to do the same, so I was very excited when I came across Christine Tyler Hill’s analog newsletter project The Cloud Report. These monthly newsletters are dispatches from the corner where Christine spends her time as a crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont. As she calls it, a newsletter about “nothing and everything.”
When she applied for the job through the Department of Public Works, Christine had just started freelancing. She figured the routine would be a good way to ensure there was some structure in her day, and that she got outside first thing in the morning. Returning day after day to her morning shift has not only ensured she gets to help kids walk and bike to school safely—as she told me, “I’m happy to be a human traffic cone if it helps!”—the act of being in the same place and paying attention to all of its ins and outs has opened up a new world.
As Christine puts it, “the intersection is a liminal space–everyone is on their way somewhere else, briefly pausing at a red light before rushing off. The intersection isn’t a destination.”
“On the surface, nothing happens there. But when you stand there from 7:30-8:20am every morning, you see it all: a parent beautifully answering their child’s question about why bees buzz while they tenderly grab their hand to cross the street; Black-eyed Susans pushing up from a crack in the sidewalk and swaying in the breeze; an elderly woman collecting cans and loading them into an overflowing shopping cart; a pitbull in a sweater happily trotting down the sidewalk; a professional looking man behind the wheel of his Buick, screaming on his cell phone, veins popping out of his neck; a Rav-4 with a bag of doggie doo pinned under the rear wiper. This is life! It’s messy, it’s gorgeous, it’s sad, it’s beautiful, it’s everything.”
She took to reporting on these “little nothing moments” and all the assorted interactions on her Instagram stories. Taking a picture of the sky, Christine would add a simple line of text on top: The Cloud Report. The newsletter project is born out of those daily findings.
I was reminded of my friend Boaz Frankel who many years ago would regularly share a photo of the sky viewed from his apartment. Same view every time, different sky, different weather, different light. It was far more compelling than any weather report I could look at.
Even in the midst of a world that constantly demands new, new, new, most of us still have some kind of a routine to our daily lives, a schedule that keeps us coming back to the same thing day in and day out. It’s good to have artists remind us that even in the most well-known places there is always something new to be found.
For the past year artist Barbara Bosworth has been keeping a weather journal, not just taking a daily photo but also printing them and collecting them in a notebook.
“The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to,” writes Jenny O’Dell in How to Do Nothing. On a sketchbook page, day after day, attention to weather becomes far more than just noticing if it’s rainy or sunny out. When I saw Bosworth’s work I envisioned a collection of sky paint swatches.
“I think the advent of AI has people craving art made by humans, and art that people can hold and touch. There’s a turn towards the analog.”
-Christine Tyler Hill
In an attention economy, where all of our time and energy could go to what is taking place on a screen, these kinds of projects feel like radical acts. And clearly people want them.
“People like an invitation to narrow their attention,” Christine says. “Our smartphones have us receiving incredibly consequential information from all over the globe at all hours. Maybe totally inconsequential information from a street corner in Vermont, in print, is a pause from the overwhelm.”
In her own practice, Christine has often drawn digitally. But The Cloud Report is illustrated with analog materials, then risograph printed, a print style that embraces its imperfections. When I got The Cloud Report in the mail, I loved that Christine had designed it to be sent as-is. With no envelope, the stamp and postal markings were part of the piece. This too feels like a reminder to be in the here and now, to appreciate the slower, textured world.
“I think the advent of AI has people craving art made by humans, and art that people can hold and touch. There’s a turn towards the analog,” says Christine, whose analog newsletter has attracted almost 2,000 subscribers. “I’m stapling, labeling, and putting a stamp on each one. It’s a very handmade project, and I think people want more of that in their lives.”
Yes, I couldn’t agree more! What I find so inspiring about Christine’s project isn’t just that it’s beautiful or that it’s a cool project, it’s that it inspires me to go out and apply similar creative lenses to my own world.
What can I pay attention to? What art can I make about it? What new ways can be explored if I let texture be at the forefront? What am I not seeing that’s right in front of me?
For the February issue, Christine set out to identify the four trees closest to the corner she works at. This was something she had wanted to do for years, but, “The Cloud Report gave me the reason to finally do it,” says Christine. “The centerfold of the issue includes scans of the twigs I harvested, watercolor paintings of the trees, a map I drew, and a little graphic showing my confidence level in my identification.”
In my mind, this is what good art has the capacity to do. Takes you somewhere else for a bit, but also challenges you to pay attention to your own surroundings in a new way. I asked Christine if there was something surprising that she had discovered working on this practice of attention. The answer was simple: “The personal really is universal.”
Christine’s work may be about her one small corner of the world, but we all have a small corner, and we all have a capacity to create deeper connections with those small corners. In the micro, we discover the macro.
Don’t we all need more of that?
“My creative practice is rooted in the belief that my life is immeasurably improved by being in touch with the ecology and people in my immediate vicinity,” says Christine. “Everything is insane right now, and I think I despair less than the average person… I feel hope when the Red Maple on the corner buds out once again in the spring, or the Asters bloom again in the fall. I feel hope when I wave to my neighbor on their way to teach music to elementary schoolers, and I chat briefly with another neighbor who’s running for city council, and another who helps low-income Vermonters winterize their homes… there’s hope everywhere if you know where to look for it, and I’d like to help people find it wherever they are.”
When so much of our world feels out of control, these creative efforts are a balm. Not only do they remind us of where we are, and what we’re connected to, but these practices of attention help us to feel more deeply about those places and people. Christine cites a Rumi quote as words of inspiration: “Where you are, and whatever you do, be in love.”
“I feel in love with the world when I’m bike touring, or on top of a mountain, or sharing a meal with friends...” Christine says. “But even if I’m on a streetcorner next to a puddle of dog piss on an overcast morning, I can always find something that makes me fall in love with the world. Paying attention makes me feel alive.”
There’s always something to make us feel alive, no matter where we are. But first, we have to choose to look.
-Anna
More Creative Attention Resources from Christine
—> Corita Kent and her viewfinder–I’ve been wanting to make one and take it to the intersection forever, maybe I’ll do that for the March issue.
—> Jenny Odell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Hannah Hinchman.
—> How to with John Wilson.
—> Right now, I’m reading Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (thanks to a recommendation from a The Cloud Report subscriber). He spends a weekend sitting in a cafe window overlooking a single intersection in Paris and records every single thing he sees–that’s the whole book. I sorta cherry-pick my favorite things from the intersection for The Cloud Report each month, but I’m inspired by his approach to include it all.
Amelia Arvesen is doing a year-long series exploring wool. If you are a lover of textiles, check out her first installment.
For paper lovers (or anyone who just wants a challenging creative project): Kelli Anderson’s assortment of cut/fold templates.
Summer Brennan is hosting another edition of Essay Camp in March. I’ve participated several times and always really enjoy it.
If you’re near Portland, Maine —> sign up for Women’s Wave next weekend and dip in the ocean with thousands of women.
Love this. I just got a puppy and it’s been like slamming on the brakes. He’s my new meditation teacher. Slowing me down. He’s obsessed with the small details. Each leaf, the moss on the rock, the smell under the bush, the rabbit poop. So much rabbit poop. Had been exhausting but also a much needed reframe. This is inspiring me to see what art I can create around moving slowly (and sometimes and for short bursts fast) with him.
You got the "pay attention" memo too!