Just Listening

a conversation to be quiet for

I said I was going on a writing retreat. That is a version of truth. But I am realizing (with some guilt because I do teach and advocate for these things after all) that saying I was going away to write felt like the only way I could justify, in our modern busy always-be-producing world, taking this time.

But really I was going away by myself to listen.

“For it is not necessary to strut about like a conquerer and want to give a name to things, to everything. It is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen, yielding like a lover.” Henry Corbin

To sit by the river for hours and just listen with all my senses. To watch the rain and the wild dances of the trees as the wind howls through us and the gentle shifts of sunlight and how the rocks sigh in response. To quiet even my breath so that I might hear the grass breathing beside me.

A kind of listening that modernity has tried to annihilate with constant noise and words and input, input, input from the machine. Modernity which has told us that only humans communicate.

I was seeking the silence so that my own mind could stop the spin. Slowness, so I could listen to the more-than-human. So that I could listen to the invisible. There is a whole ancient conversation going on in different decibels and tones than our own.

And not to listen to receive some great download -Not for prophecy or path-finding, not to make that big decision or dream up the title of my next project. And this too is important, because even our spirituality has been highjacked by consumerism and the pressure to psychologize and produce something others can value, hasn’t it? And so we feel we can justify time in quiet or time in reflection if- and only if- it produces. Did you figure yourself out? Can you now translate the message from the mountain? Are you enlightened now?

No. I was just listening.

And yes, oh my god, in my listening I felt myself open. In my listening I reinhabited my skin. In my listening I joined the earth and it felt really fucking good. In my listening my body knew that I am never alone. In my listening something I don’t need a name for began healing in me.

Can I prove it or perform it? Can I create a bullet point list so others can do it too?

No.

But is that worth telling all those people to wait? I won’t return your email now. I won’t answer those interview questions due next week. I won’t help figure out the fix to that problem we all know isn’t going away. I won’t be there.

I will be here. Where I can hear the earth.

I can’t tell you anything helpful about waking in the quiet dark and getting up to go outside and stand silent under the stars, except that it was important.

And that the stars were singing and I didn’t need to translate the song.