Cody Cook-Parrott: Attention is a Creative Act

Cody Cook-Parrott: Really, I need to write a book that’s just called How to Not Make Everything My Job, because if I get momentum, I’m like, “Oh, I’ll turn it into my job and then I will have to make money at it.” Keeping something unattached to my job, to my work, has just been so, so important to me.

Tami Simon: Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Cody Cook-Parrott. Cody is a writer, artist, and movement practitioner who builds simple structures to help artists make work. Cody writes a weekly newsletter, hosts the podcast Common Shapes, and facilitates a weekly writing group called Landscapes. They’re the author of several books, including How to Not Always Be Working, Getting to Center, and a new book that I’m proud to say is from Sounds True. It’s called The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World. Cody, welcome.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Thanks so much, Tami. So happy to be here.

Tami Simon: Tell me how you came to write a book on the practice of attention.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Gosh. Through Instagram addiction, really. To put it really bluntly, I used Instagram for many years and just found myself — and found my community of artists — really addicted to it and having their attention really fractured by it. This feeling of, “I can’t sit down to write for long periods of time,” or, “I can’t record my album and focus the way I want to.” I was seeing artists really lose their focus. And so through my own journey of making the decision to leave Instagram, which sort of happened through the process of writing this book, The Practice of Attention really all began with looking at it through this kind of recovery and addiction space.

Tami Simon: Obviously, being on the internet and using social media has been an important part of your career. How do you balance the negatives — the fragmentation part — with all the positives you’ve gained, and how do you come to that special alchemy for yourself?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I love that word alchemy. Something I often say is, “I’m not anti-technology.” I love being online. I love the internet. I love emailing. I love finding interesting articles to read. I love listening to audiobooks. I love making playlists. But for me, social media just really became too overwhelming to find that alchemy, to find that happy medium place. For people who aren’t wanting to leave social media completely, I talk about this in the book — I think a lot about digital detoxes, taking breaks: a week, a month, even just a day or a few hours. Having these little breaks so that we can attune ourselves back to our creative work and practices. Breaks are a really big way for me. You mentioned my book, How to Not Always Be Working — even though I’m not using social media, workaholism is really easy for me to slip into. As I’ve been talking about this book, I keep reminding people that our phones and computers have off buttons, and so we can really power down so that we can really tune into the self.

Tami Simon: It’s interesting that you brought up workaholism right here at the beginning of our conversation. It’s part of what made me personally very interested in your book, The Practice of Attention. You talked at one point about the importance of hobbies — many hobbies, not just one. From my perspective as a historic workaholic, even having one hobby seemed like a big deal. I didn’t have room for it in my life for the longest time. So I want to ask: How do you discern the difference between workaholism and, “I love my work. I’m really passionate about it. It’s serving a lot of people. It’s really fulfilling. Leave me alone and let me work, please”?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I feel like I’ve been lucky to have a lot of amazing partnerships in my life, both romantic and platonic. When my partner says to me, “We’re not having enough time together,” or, “We haven’t been on a date in months,” or, “It’s not fun to hang out with you,” and I look into her beautiful eyes and I’m like, “How can I deny this beautiful woman my sense of self?” What often comes to me is my friendships, my girlfriend, my parents. I’m lucky to have parents really involved in my life, and they only live two hours away, so when it’s been a couple of months that I haven’t seen them, that’s usually an indicator. If I haven’t called my little brother in a while, that’s an indicator. I have these little indicators that come from the people I love. When the people I love say to me, “Cody, I’m not seeing enough of you,” that’s usually a sign that I’ve slipped into workaholism — because even if I’m not working all the time, I might be thinking about work all the time and letting that anxiety stop me from traveling or picking up the phone. So, definitely surrounding myself with loved ones who feel comfortable being very honest with me.

Tami Simon: That’s a great answer. Now, I mentioned hobbies, and I just want to make sure that comes out as a complete communication, because it’s strong in the way you write about it in The Practice of Attention — that you’re not necessarily accruing greater economic reward from your hobby. And it may not even be something that’s directly in service of people. You’re just having fun doing this, whatever goofy thing you like to do. Don’t we have time for that?

Cody Cook-Parrott: Out of everything in the book, hobbies is still the thing I am the most haunted by, troubled by — the thing I’m always truly dedicated to trying to figure out. Really, I need to write a book that’s just called How to Not Make Everything My Job, because I get passionate about something — and I think this maybe has to do with having ADHD — but it can be easy for me to lose momentum. And so if I get momentum, I’m like, “Oh, I’ll turn it into my job and then I will have to make money at it, and then I will have to keep doing it.” Keeping something unattached to my job, to my work, has just been so, so important to me. I just recently went to this beautiful little horse ranch right around the corner from our house. They help rehabilitate horses and also hang out with kids in the area who have autism or developmental disabilities, and those kids get to walk around with the horses. The horses need friends, the friends need horses. It’s this really beautiful place, and they need help with their newsletter. I was like, “Oh, I love making newsletters” — it was sort of like, “How can I do this thing that isn’t my job but is connected to my job and my passion, and have it be in service to someone else?” And then I get to walk the horses, and that part’s just really fun.

Tami Simon: In The Practice of Attention, you share about how you recovered from alcohol addiction north of 14 years ago, and you draw some parallels between addiction to social media and alcohol addiction. Sometimes this can get a little blurry for me when we’re talking about workaholism and addiction to technology, so I’m curious how you view it all, and especially as it pertains to our attention.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Coming back to that word alchemy — trying to figure out, “Can I use this thing in moderation?” is the question I’m usually asking myself. Food, shopping, sex: those are all things that I have had to sometimes put little bumpers on, like when you’re bowling — to make sure my ball doesn’t fall into the gutter. Some of that is just bringing my attention to be like, “Okay, I want to focus my eating in this way so that I’m not swinging on the pendulum to overeating or undereating, over-earning or under-earning” — all these different whack-a-mole things, I call it, in addiction. I think when I bring my attention to the matter at hand, I have an easier time understanding, “Do I need to step away from this completely or not?” Staying sober for almost 15 years has not been easy, but sometimes I joke it’s the easiest choice I make every day, because I just have none. I don’t try to moderate how much alcohol I put in my body. And my relationship to social media really mirrored alcohol in that way — I was trying to moderate how much I was putting into my psyche and I just could not moderate it. So I chose the zero route, which has some grief in it. I wish I could find a beautiful, healthy relationship with social media. That sounds great, but I just personally couldn’t.

Tami Simon: Do you think that might change in time? That there’ll be something more balanced — if that’s quite the right word?

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yeah, I have been wondering that. It’s been really interesting being on my little promotional tour of podcasts for this book. I really feel the weight of not having social media. I’ve never had a book come out without social media, and it feels a little tricky because there’s been a part of me that’s like, “Do I get an account again?” But so much of the book is about not using it. I’m in a dance right now with it, asking myself, “Could I have it? Could I have a virtual assistant keep the account up and I wouldn’t even touch it?” I maybe wish I would’ve kept my old account up as an archive, and I decided not to do that. I did decide to delete it completely. I don’t think my journey is done. I think I’m still asking questions and still staying curious about it.

Tami Simon: Some of what I really love about your approach to talking about these topics is encapsulated in the values that you post on your website. I wanted to talk about a few of them. “Structure with softness” — I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to find a more disciplined approach to my own creative art-making, I like that. I like structure with softness.” Tell me more what you mean by that.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Something that I am always thinking about with discipline is: how do I weave in devotion? I love doing morning pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. One soft structure for me is: it’s okay if they’re afternoon pages, it’s okay if they’re nighttime pages — don’t tell Julia, she says in the morning — or it’s okay if they’re two pages instead of three. My examples of soft structures are: how can I offer myself a little more gentleness, a little more grace, and have my devotional activities that I do often every day, but let them be at different times? Let myself off the hook if it’s the few days before my period — maybe I’m not as hard on myself. But that’s the dance: I also don’t want to make too many excuses for myself, because I really want to stay devoted to the activities that bring me the most creative joy and pleasure.

Tami Simon: Devotion is such a beautiful word. Tell me more what you mean by it.

Cody Cook-Parrott: To me, devotion is a really spiritual action word, and it means: what do I believe in, or have hope for? As much as I love hope, I also love Pema Chödrön’s idea of hopelessness — this idea of stripping away hope and just being left bare with what is. So to me, devotion is that dance and song of how do I move towards what I hope to see in the world, turning it over to my higher power and surrendering my whole life — usually through journaling, walking, movement. Those are my most devotional acts. Devotion is just the gentle entrance to understanding the self a little better.

Tami Simon: You mentioned your own ADHD, and I wasn’t aware of that before our conversation. Having a mind that is not neuro-compliant — that’s the way I talk about myself.

Cody Cook-Parrott: I like that.

Tami Simon: I think particularly “structure with softness” resonates because sometimes when things are very rigidly explained to me — like, “Here’s your book for creating new habits” — I think, “That’s never going to work for me.” But at the same time, I do need a little more structure. One of the things I was moved by is how you mentioned the Pomodoro Technique — I’m not sure if I’m saying that correctly — was extraordinarily helpful to you in your writing. Can you share with people how you used that technique, what it is, and how you used it?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I live in northern Michigan, and there’s a really rich community of elders here who are writers and artists. A friend who’s written many novels said to me — I had said to her, “I’m really struggling to write my book. I’m struggling to sit down and write it.” And she said, “Well, what are you doing from five to 7:00 AM every day?” And I was like, “Sleeping.” And she was like, “What if you use that time to write the book?” And so I started doing that as a practice, and that is how I wrote this book — mostly from five to 7:00 AM for a few months. As I started doing it, there was still something left to unlock, and I worked with Dr. Kate Henry, who is an amazing productivity coach. She really approaches productivity from a slow, neurodivergent, queer perspective. She set me up with the Pomodoro method, which was to write for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and then write for another 25 minutes, doing that a couple of times. It just brought so much joy to my writing. It made me love writing again. I loved taking my little five-minute breaks — to have a snack, peel an orange, let the dog outside, fill up my coffee, look at my phone for a second — just get these little dopamine moments and then go back in. I really think The Practice of Attention is my strongest book that I’ve ever written, and I think part of that is from writing in that way.

Tami Simon: One of my favorite quotes: “Attention is in and of itself a creative act.” That was one of my favorite quotes from the book, because what it did was make me start looking at everything differently. A lot of the way I pay attention is through the visual, but also listening and seeing the creativity that I’m bringing to the act of perception. “Attention is in and of itself a creative act.” Just a beautiful, beautiful line. I want to mention two other guiding values that you list on your website that really got my attention: “Agency over urgency.” Tell me how you came up with that.

Cody Cook-Parrott: I have to give credit — I worked with a copywriter on my website, Nicole Cloutier, and Nicole pulled that out of a bunch of free writing that I did. I just wrote all the different words that I felt were a part of my values, and that was one that she really pointed at and was like, “Agency over urgency.” Most of my students and members of my writing group are queer, neurodivergent, trans, BIPOC — weirdos, freaks — definitely the outsiders. I think one of my gifts is to really build spaces where I give people permission to just be themselves and have agency over their work and their life, and to do it outside of capitalism just a little bit, so that we’re not running on urgency.

Tami Simon: I didn’t know that about you, Cody, in terms of the audience that you’ve magnetized as your students and in your online classes. It does inspire me to bring forward that one of the things I notice that makes my own creative expression challenging is that I feel so weird. When it all comes out, it’s going to be this glittering rainbow of not-previously-seen strings of words that I feel afraid to put out there. I wonder if you could address that directly, in terms of the audience you’re working with and how you help people with that.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Well, first of all, I just think you’re so cool, Tami. Most people that I think are really cool are really weird — I’m not saying you’re not weird.

Tami Simon: That’s all right. Yeah.

Cody Cook-Parrott: I think I just express myself with such abandon that it shows other people in the room, “Oh, I can run a business and I don’t have to, for lack of a better word, wear a suit and tie.” I think business up until not that long ago — especially business books or books about self-employment — were just written by men, and specifically white, cis, straight men. I think I forget sometimes that we’re carving out space as business owners in a really different way, and we don’t get to see that all that much. That’s what I would tell someone who feels that way: it’s a little hippie-dippy manifestation, but just trust that you’ll attract the right people. Start your project as weird as it feels or as odd as it seems, and just trust that the right people will come into your space.

Tami Simon: You write that one of your core principles is a type of anti-perfectionism. Tell me more about that and how you help people with that.

Cody Cook-Parrott: In the beginning of the pandemic, from about 2020 to 2023, I taught a very popular quilting class called A Quilt is Something Human. It was a four-week class on Zoom — how to make a quilt in a month — and the last session was show and tell. As a dancer and as a quilter, anti-perfectionism is just a huge part of improvising for me — of spontaneous choice-making and just really being alive with throwing an arm out and being like, “Oh, that wasn’t the right move,” and then twisting back to the other side, or cutting a piece of fabric and being like, “Oh, that was weird,” and then cutting it in half again and seeing what happens. In A Quilt is Something Human, the most beautiful thing is when a student comes to that first week and introduces themselves and they’re really nervous — they’re in a group of new people and they’re like, “I don’t know how to quilt, but I really want to try” — and then at show and tell they just have this amazing quilt they’ve created, or multiple quilts. I find so much joy in teaching anti-perfectionism through quilt-making specifically, and showing people how you can design something and then literally just cut it into pieces and rearrange it, sew it into something else.

Tami Simon: It makes a lot of sense when you talk about it in terms of quilting, and I can also imagine it very easily in terms of dancing. How do you apply that in your writing?

Cody Cook-Parrott: One of my favorite writers and best friends and Sounds True authors is the poet Jacqueline Suskin. Jacqueline has this beautiful book, Every Day Is a Poem. Jacqueline to me is the quintessential improviser as a writer. She had this project for years called Poem Store — she’s written tens of thousands of poems on her typewriter. Someone says a word to her and she writes them a poem, and you can’t delete, you can’t backspace. I look at that practice of writing, of anti-perfectionism and improvising, as so beautiful because it also takes great acceptance. Jacqueline doesn’t chase somebody down at the farmer’s market and say, “Oh gosh, I have to redo the last line.” She hands them that poem and that’s it. In my own writing, it was beautiful to have a beautiful editing process with this book. I loved my team at Sounds True so much. But at the same time, a lot of the writing that really remained in the book was my kind of first draft — those strong sentences that remained got rearranged in some ways, but I feel like some of anti-perfectionism and improvising is accepting that the thing might stay and we might not rearrange it.

Tami Simon: The book had a fabulous first sentence, and I love it when books have strong first sentences. Here’s your first sentence: “One might assume that a book about attention should be written by someone who studies attention, but I argue it should be written by someone who studies art.”

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yeah.

Tami Simon: I was like, yeah, you go.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Especially in the self-help nonfiction world, there is this pressure on books to be sort of scientific, to be like, “Show me the data,” which I love — I’m a reader of books like those. But I think that sentence was almost me giving myself permission to write a book without a lot of data. I was like, “I could try to research and get the science behind all of this, but I think I just want to write from my experience and from the experience of being an artist and the experience I see other artists searching through in their own mediums.”

Tami Simon: One more of your guiding values that I liked: “Consistency over intensity.” Now that’s interesting because you appear to be quite an intense person, and yet here you are with consistency over intensity.

Cody Cook-Parrott: That’s some advice I need to take myself, probably. But to me, that one is really about: how can I do a little thing each day instead of, “I have to write for eight hours”? Which can work sometimes for me — I can flow for that long. But I did a project for many years called Personal Practice, where I made a dance video every day for a year, and they were 15 seconds long. I didn’t make an evening-length ballet that year, but I made these little snippets of movement every day. I don’t necessarily think we have to do things daily, but I do love a container for daily practice. It really helps me.

Tami Simon: You mention in the book that if you get nothing else out of this book — and I always pay special attention whenever I see a sentence like that — please do the Attention Audit. Here’s how you do it. So go ahead, tell our listeners how to approach an Attention Audit.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yes, the Attention Audit. I also want to shout out: if you order the book and you go to thepracticeofattention.com, you can put in your receipt and get the Attention Audit workbook — a free little workbook that goes with the book. The Attention Audit was really born out of my own experience doing 12-step inventories: either bigger ones or even just daily little inventories of, “Where am I letting my higher power in? Where am I ignoring my higher power? How can I loosen up a little bit? Where do I need to tighten up?” The Attention Audit is really for anyone who wants to spend less time on their phone, on social media, with tech, or with just anything — whatever your thing is that you feel is consuming you more than you’d like. Could be watching Netflix, or maybe you’re reading. There’s nothing you could read too much of — I was going to say romance novels, but honestly it sounds great. Maybe there’s just something where you’re like, “I wish I was doing this instead of this with my time.” The Attention Audit helps you really track your time, track your energy, because it’s so easy to say, “Oh, I don’t have time to have a hobby,” and it’s like, “Well, how much time are you spending on your phone? How much time are you spending watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy?” — asking for a friend.

Tami Simon: Tell me more. I’m not going to get the workbook. I’m listening, I’m driving in my car. How do I bring my attention to how I’m spending it?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I think bringing your attention to how you’re spending it is opening up your awareness field and just noticing. Something I talk a lot about in the book is turning the dial up even 1%. So even if it’s 1% more of a noticing practice — like, “Oh, I’m noticing that I wish I was listening to more audiobooks. I’m listening to the radio again in the car. I could turn on an audiobook even for my 20-minute drive.” Just starting to very subtly notice how you are spending your time. And then, when you’re not in the car, if you have that little extra momentum, grab a pen and paper and write down your morning, your afternoon, and your evening: how did you spend your time in those three sections, and how might you want to change it?

Tami Simon: One of your confessional moments towards the beginning of The Practice of Attention had to do with the fact that you write about how you didn’t pay your taxes for seven years. And how there was this underground sense — this is my language — where you didn’t feel like you were in your own integrity, and that was part of what was driving the fragmentation of attention, because you didn’t really want to be with yourself. I think this is a really important point: how do we get down into the root system of what’s driving our fragmentation? Why is it that we’re so uncomfortable that we’re reaching for X, Y, Z? What’s driving it? Can you say more about that and your process of resolving it?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I love the line: “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A lot of people use that when they’re just ready to give something up, or give up struggling — right when you hit the bottom and you’re ready to climb up. That’s really how it was for me with the taxes. I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired and really just wanted to feel free. I don’t like paying my taxes, even though I do try to pay them gladly and with gratitude, but it feels so much better. The last couple of years, I’ve paid my quarterly taxes on time. I’ve set enough aside for them. That is huge after seven years of basically stealing from myself and then going into a huge amount of debt with the IRS and frankly living outside my means. It’s something that we talk a lot about in the groups I host: just getting a bookkeeper or setting up your books really early, having an accountant or a CPA and getting clear with the numbers, because that has just been a huge part of my pain and my story. I still slip into moments where I’ll take on more debt or I won’t be totally solvent, and that’s another attention moment for me — if my money is out of sync, I know that I’ve made a misstep somewhere.

Tami Simon: How do you help people track what is under the surface that is driving their desire to distract? Like, “I’m going to do the Netflix binge,” because something’s driving me that I don’t want to look at.

Cody Cook-Parrott: The question I generally ask someone — if I’m having a one-on-one session with them, or their friends who have looked through the book — is: “What are you avoiding? What are you avoiding feeling?” And usually we can track that to maybe an action that isn’t getting done, like the taxes. Or it’s like, “Okay, if you’re avoiding feeling lonely, are you spending too much time out with friends? Are you not spending enough time in solitude?” Usually there’s an action we can sort of go with. It really is that simple: asking that question and seeing what comes through.

Tami Simon: In this area of inquiry, you write about building our “discomfort capacity,” and I thought this is really good. A lot of people are so uncomfortable — about what’s happening in the world, in their neighborhood, in their heart, in their relationships. How have you built your discomfort capacity?

Cody Cook-Parrott: My discomfort capacity definitely comes from — I’m not a huge sitting meditation person, but I’m a big walking meditation person and movement meditation. When anybody asks me what my favorite book is, it’s absolutely When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön. I love that it’s called When Things Fall Apart, not If. The practices in that book have really stuck with me in terms of letting go of what other people think of me. Something she talks about so much in her work is using the breath specifically, turning toward the discomfort. So instead of trying to get rid of it, to be like, “Okay, let’s say I am really uncomfortable that I haven’t paid my taxes — I’m going to breathe in that discomfort for everyone who is so uncomfortable that they haven’t paid their taxes, and then I’m going to breathe out relief for all of us.” I’m not remembering what that practice is called, but that’s one of my favorites. Being comfortable being uncomfortable is a muscle — it’s another practice. You just have to practice it a couple of times and it gets less hard.

Tami Simon: The practice from Tibetan Buddhism is called tonglen — just to fill that in. And it literally means “sending and receiving” — taking in the pain and sending out the relief. You bring up another practice that I had never heard of before: the emotional car.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yeah, the emotional car is an idea I’ve heard my own former therapist and other therapist friends talk about. It reminds me of parts work in some ways. Basically, when a part of you is really frustrated or screaming and crying and kicking and doesn’t want to go on the ride of life, instead of sticking them in the trunk, you can put them in the passenger seat or the backseat and say, “Come along for the ride. You can talk to me about it on the drive, but you can’t drive the car and you can’t touch the radio.” I want to bring all of the parts of me along. It’s often like nine-year-old Cody is a part that I really work with a lot. Nine-year-old Cody kind of wants to run the show, really wants to protect me, and I want to stick them in the trunk — I’m like, “Shut up, just let me do this.” But they really need to be heard. So we put them in the backseat and then they can talk to me about what’s going on, but they don’t get to drive. They’re only nine.

Tami Simon: What I think is great about how you talk about these practices and clearing out our own root system is this: as a creator, a maker, having access to high-quality attention yourself — you have to be a clean machine in order for this all to come through you. If you’ve got a bunch of parts stuck in the trunk and you keep the trunk totally locked down, then you find yourself feeling under a stranglehold of some kind, unable to voice — it’s because, mixing metaphors here, there’s all this stuff pushed down that has you all clogged up.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yeah, I like “clean machine.” The thing that’s coming to me when you paint that picture is circling all the way back to having friends and colleagues and peers — those relationships that can help you unclog. I think of so many people in my life, books, friends, documentaries that awoke something in me and helped me. I’m picturing one of those little cleaners that you clean a straw out with — they kind of unclog the pipes. Just another shout-out for the importance of friends and community.

Tami Simon: Speaking of that, you’re gifted at a lot of things, Cody, but one of them is bringing people together online. Unlike a social media feed where it’s just out there for you to compare yourself to other people, you’re bringing people together in creative ways. Can you talk about the Landscapes work you’re doing and other ways you bring people together online?

Cody Cook-Parrott: I have a writing group called Landscapes, and I also have another coworking group running right now called Flexible Office, which is a little more focused on admin work and a little more cross-disciplinary. I also teach writing classes, quilting classes, and a lot of creative business classes. But honestly, my coworking spaces are maybe my favorite. They’re really low-pressure. Everyone is really encouraged to show up exactly as they are that day. Some people show up and are literally working on their second novel. Other people show up and can barely put the toast in the toaster. Everybody is operating at different capacities, but we’re all cheering each other on and there’s no wrong way to do it. It’s just a lot better than social media — it’s just real connection. I’ve also watched so many people in my coworking spaces become friends, build those unclogging techniques together as a group, invite each other to be on each other’s podcasts or meet up in person. When I taught a dance and writing intensive in Western Mass last year, seven members of Landscapes came, and it was just so amazing to meet them in person and to see them meeting each other for the first time. There’s kind of nothing like it. It’s really my favorite place to be on the internet.

Tami Simon: When you mentioned some people are working on their second novel, I thought you were going to say some people come in their pajamas.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Oh, definitely. Today was the first day of this season of Flexible Office and multiple people — I was in my pajamas. I did put hard pants on for this interview, but I was definitely in my pajamas at Flexible Office.

Tami Simon: Your first company, at least that I heard about, was called Have Company. Pretty funny name. How do you bring your entrepreneurism and your artistic nature together without feeling a conflict? Some people are like, “I’m never going to be selling. Keep these things separate.” But you’re creatively bringing it all together. How do you see it?

Cody Cook-Parrott: Have Company — have you ever seen Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s rulings? He has all these beautiful New Year’s resolutions — you should look them up sometime. One of them is “Have company but don’t waste time.” So I’ve clearly always been thinking about attention and time, and that’s where Have Company comes from. There are a lot of good ones. One is “Keep the hoping machine running.” They’re all little mini-poems. Business as creative practice is a huge value of mine. Being an entrepreneur, being a business owner, is fun to me.

Tami Simon: I say it’s a contact sport. That’s what I say to people.

Cody Cook-Parrott: I love that. As this book comes out, I’ve been sitting with the question: what is the role of the artist who is also a business owner? My friend Amelia Ruby says, “Are you a business owner, an artist, or a secret third thing?” — which is sort of this combination of all of it. I had my first art show in a gallery this past year, after being an artist since I was a child — I’m 37 now — and it felt amazing to just have quilts up on the wall in a gallery with my name on it. As an entrepreneur, I had programming: I had quilt camp where 10 people came from all over the country to quilt together. I made a catalog. I did a raffle quilt for an Abolish ICE raffle. It’s like that’s the entrepreneurial spirit I have: I want it to be multifaceted and speak to many layers of the artistic process. I always am thinking about what’s the next great business idea. I have a roadside stand up by my house right now, and once the snow melts, the nice Amish people are going to bring it back down to the road — so that’s my next business. It will be the roadside stand project. It doesn’t have a name yet, but I’m close.

Tami Simon: It sounds like your entrepreneurial ideas are another expression of your multifaceted creativity. We’ve talked about movement and quilt-making — you’ve got a lot going on of an experimental nature. For some people, the money thing is over here and art is somewhere different. But in you, it seems like it’s an expression of your creative, service-oriented heart.

Cody Cook-Parrott: It is. At the same time, I have a BFA in dance, and I have made very little money dancing in the last 37 years, and that’s okay to me. I don’t feel like I tried and failed. In the way we’ve been talking about hobbies and work and protecting certain parts — I’ve always sort of protected dance from capitalism. There have been times where I’ve been hired to choreograph a music video or be in something, but for the most part, dance has been my little quiet thing that I keep for me. I joke that I’m the fanciest because my dancing has been written about in The New York Times and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, but my writing hasn’t. I just have to let the puzzle pieces be where they are.

Tami Simon: Because I’ve never seen you dance — can you describe it to me?

Cody Cook-Parrott: My dance lineage goes back to Judson Church in New York City, and improvisers like Yvonne Rainer and Twyla Tharp — they’re all kind of the generations above me. It’s very distally initiated — a lot of arms and legs initiating, and a lot of spiral movement spinning up and then spinning back down to the ground. A lot of moving across the floor, a lot of bending. I usually like to dance to ambient music — Emily Sprague and Colo are two of my favorite musicians. And yeah, lots of hands.

Tami Simon: I’m getting a good feeling for it. Thank you.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Good, good.

Tami Simon: I want to end with how you began The Practice of Attention — with a quote from Simone Weil. I’ll just read the first part of it: “Attention taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” It’s a powerful quote to start a book that brings together devotion and discipline with our attention. How could attention be like prayer in your view?

Cody Cook-Parrott: For me, praying is something I am always doing. It’s something I do every time I look out the window. When I wake up in the morning, I have a few prayers that I say. Praying doesn’t have to be this big gesture — it can be just really simple little sayings, or mantras, or questions. It’s the same as attention because attention is whatever we are listening to, devoted to, thinking about, going towards, moving towards. To me, prayer and attention are sort of the same side of the same coin. If I’m paying attention to it, that is a prayerful act — which brings me to: if I’m paying attention to Instagram all the time, that’s not a very good prayer for me. It kind of snaps me out of what I’m paying attention to when I’m like, “If my attention is a prayer, I don’t really like what I’m praying right now” — if I’m overly consuming the news or something that isn’t quite sitting right with me.

Tami Simon: That’s a very good point. If you’re engaging in an activity that is putting you into a comparing-mind state, or watching something that is creating discomfort or numbness, asking yourself: is this the prayer that I want to be praying right now?

Cody Cook-Parrott: Yeah. Yeah.

Tami Simon: It has been so much fun to meet you.

Cody Cook-Parrott: I had so much fun too.

Tami Simon: Cody Cook-Parrott, author of the new Sounds True book The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World. And where do people go to get the free workbook for the Attention Audit?

Cody Cook-Parrott: You go to thepracticeofattention.com and you can put in your receipt info and you’ll automatically get emailed a little workbook to help you do the Attention Audit.

Tami Simon: The workbook. Very good. Thank you so much. Much love. Bye-bye.

Cody Cook-Parrott: Thanks, Tami. Bye.