Attention is the prism

• Attention defines the color of our perceptions. 
• How we attend to things is prior to our sensation of them. 
• Attention is the medium of meaning in our senses. 
• Attention is to sensation as mind is to brain. 
• The view that pretends to objectivity, the 'scientific' mode of attention, strips away the meaning and replaces it with detachment. That mode is the novice’s view. 
• The expert has built up a storehouse of meanings in his apprehension of 'the facts.' 
• We bring meaning into the perception of things, and we thereby add a creative ingredient into how we apprehend both the world as well as how we apprehend ourselves. 
• Meaning is inescapably value-laden. 
• Meaning is evaluative in that it shapes our attention to a thing, and thus shapes our relation to the thing. 

The question is how is meaning tied to desert? Both meaning and desert involve the action of some creative element. The question is how does creativity relate to meaning-generation and how to desert-generation? 

It could be meaning and desert are complements. Meaning is the personal experience of what the general society experiences as desert. 

Attention is the way in which we perceive. With our left hemisphere we attend with respect to utility; with our right hemisphere we attend with respect to how we are connected to the thing and how we can serve the thing in stewardship. 

Attention is the prism through which we 

"bring into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 29).