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Dillard hid pennies along a sidewalk as a child and drew chalk arrows pointing to them. She treats the world as similarly strewn with small free gifts that go unclaimed because people are too distracted or too rich in expectation to stoop for them. She argues that cultivating a healthy poverty and simplicity makes you able to receive them, so that finding a penny can literally make your day.
One kind of seeing is active: you keep a running verbal commentary and use knowledge and names to pick out what you would otherwise miss. The other kind is letting go. The first can be trained through effort. The second can only be prepared for, and it comes as a gift.
Dillard draws on accounts of cataract patients who were given sight after being blind from birth. Some found vision a bewildering flood of color patches with no distance or shape, and one girl described seeing 'the tree with the lights in it.' Dillard searched for that raw, unlearned vision for years. It finally came to her unexpectedly when a backyard cedar appeared charged and transfigured, which shows that such vision cannot be summoned on demand.
At the creek's edge, Dillard watched a frog's eyes go dull while its body crumpled and sagged like a deflating football, its skin draping empty on a rock. A giant water bug had seized it, injected dissolving enzymes, and sucked its liquefied insides out. The scene becomes her test case: a spirituality of attention that only looks at pretty things is a lie, and seeing honestly means looking at horror too.
Nature works by staggering extravagance: millions of eggs, countless parasites, and endless variation of form, most of it wasted in death. The same profligate creative energy that produces intricate beauty also produces the teeming, crawling excess that repels us. So the world cannot be accepted piecemeal. To be astonished by its richness is also to be implicated in its waste and suffering.
Full presence is experienced only while you are unaware of it. The instant you think 'this is it, I am in the present,' the moment splits and you are outside it, observing yourself. Dillard illustrates this with a puppy she petted at a gas station: absorption in the animal and the mountains held until self-awareness broke it. Presence is lost through reflection and regained only by forgetting the self in the object.