There’s a moment when attention becomes something else entirely.
Sitting with a plant, your focus softens from looking at it to being with it.
When the space between you and the wild mint at your feet stops feeling like distance and starts feeling like connection.
This is what Domei opens. Not just awareness of plants. But a felt connection with them.
The kind that lives in your body, not your thoughts.
Most attention we’ve learned is extractive. We look to gather information. To identify and categorise. To take something useful away.
But there’s another kind of attention. One that creates connection rather than collection.
It’s the attention you bring when you sit with someone you care about. You are present without agenda, interested without needing.
The attention that builds relationship rather than accumulating facts.
When you practice Domei, you offer this quality of attention to plants.
Your attention doesn’t dissect or analyse. It meets. It connects.
The dandelion stops being a weed to identify and becomes a being to know.
Someone whose texture, scent, and way of moving become familiar.
Someone whose presence you recognise.
In this felt sense, you’re not alone in this moment.
You recognise there’s another life sharing this patch of earth with you.
This isn’t projection or imagination. It’s recognition.
The same recognition happens when you meet someone’s eyes across a room and feel that moment of contact.
Or when you touch your hand to an animal’s fur and feel them lean into your palm.
Connection that’s bigger than either of you individually.
Domei cultivates this with plants.
Through attention that receives rather than grasps.
That feels rather than thinks.
That connects rather than collects.
The same way you knew how to connect with the world as a child. Before you were taught that plants were background to human life.
Before, attention had become a tool for productivity rather than an act of relationship.
When you practice Domei, that original capacity for connection awakens.
The plant world stops being scenery and becomes a community.
The garden stops being yours and starts being shared.
Your daily walk stops being exercise and starts being a series of meetings with neighbours you’re learning to know.
This is attention as connection.
Simple. Direct. Felt in the body.
Not a skill to master but a capacity to remember.
It’s not something you do to plants but something you share with them.