The ear draws forth the story.
—Italo Calvino
In Praise of Listening
There’ll come a time, say the Anishinaabe, when the world’s people will arrive at a fork in the road. The air will be too thick to breathe, and it will no longer be possible to dip a cup into a stream and bring out fresh water to drink. At that time, they say, we’ll have to walk back along the paths of our ancestors, retrieving all the many treasures they have left behind. Each of us will find something that we need: some tale, some parable, some crucial story. We’ll pick it up and put it in our knapsack — whatever we can carry, large or small — and together we will walk on down the road.
For me, one of those crucial stories has to do with listening.
Most of us think of listening in a fairly literal fashion: human beings listening (or not listening) to one another; the pleasure of attending to a familiar piece of music. The word derives from the Old English hylsnan, which means, quite simply, “to pay attention.” But listening can have a far broader and more capacious meaning, moving out beyond the small apparatus of the ears to the hands or belly or enveloping spirit/mind. When a massage practitioner talks of “listening to the body,” or a gardener describes herself as “listening to the land,” when writers and artists explain that they are “listening” to their work-in-progress, they are using the word as I would like to use it here -- as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity, less actual than symbolic, less physical than metaphysical, rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world.
I have been exploring such listening for a number of years, tracking it through literature and literary history, Buddhism, nature writing, science and sociology, comforted by the echoes and connections between those very different fields. I’ve also interviewed several dozen expert listeners: writers and therapists; naturalists and story-tellers; along with a handful of superb musicians. Some of those I quote are famous and familiar: Montaigne, Chekhov, and Virginia Woolf; Mary Oliver, Barry Lopez. Some are our own magnificent contemporaries: the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the trumpeter Frank London, the avant-garde singer Meredith Monk. Others again are personal friends and colleagues, little known outside their own immediate circle. Their stories are included in the pages that follow, along with memories and impressions of my own.
In Praise of Listening is composed of thirteen chapters, each one made up of a number of short sections or “essayettes,” which can themselves be read in any order. It focuses at first on human-centered listening (listening to childhood, listening inwards), and gradually moves out into the surrounding world (listening to the wild, to the little sounds of every day). After a couple of chapters devoted to professional listening (listening to music, writers listening) it reaches a place where listening overlaps with what one might call “the ear of the heart” (communing with the dead, listening to silence or to the spirit), to arrive, finally, at a kind of global listening (“All Our Relations”) where there is nothing and no one that is not worth listening to.
In a world of racket and distraction, such generous, expansive listening is increasingly under siege. But it remains a skill worth honoring, worth passing on: a source of clarity and joy and wise embodiment, as well as a vital bridge to those with whom we disagree. “Many an old story begins with the words, ‘Long ago, when animals could speak…'” writes naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt. “Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening... ‘Long ago, when people could listen.’”
Consider the following quotations:
“Everything in life is speaking, is audible, is communicating, in spite of its apparent silence. It is not just a tale ... that the saints spoke with trees and plants in the wilderness, or that masters talked with the sun, moon, and stars.”
—Hazrat Inayat Khan
“The more you listen, the more you will hear.”
—W. B. Mathieu
Fabulous
Hearty congratulations on this venture. May the subscribers be voracious for your word and plentiful. Wonderful.