An invitation to listen, and to hear

Feel free to read this on the fly: then set time to spend with yourself

So the invitation this week is to listen, and to hear. At this point in civic life, the level of static is profoundly distracting, exhausting and dissonant. At the same time some voices are newly heard, and deserve our thoughtful attention, engaged response, and discerning amplification. 

 

We all have times when we are both interested and able to be attentive, and times when we tune out – out of habit, out of actual self-protection or out of defensiveness. Some of us listen to ourselves as we write/so we can write. Some of us are professional listeners, whether paid or volunteer: we listen to clients, patients, colleagues. In Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting taking notes is my way of listening and not spacing out.

 

A listening practice: DO try this at home, not while driving

In the same way that we can practice softening our gaze as we move from one Zoom room to another, I invite you to soften your listening. 

Shift your listening to your immediate environment.

Listen as if you have peripheral hearing (you do!) 

Stay here and rest for a bit. 

 

Now shift your listening within.

Sense your own system.

Attend to the sensations in your body.

Notice the area of your body where your attention is drawn first.

Let the sensations register in your consciousness.

Let them be vivid.

You may find you are able to stay with these sensations. Or you may find you quickly begin to follow associations or attribute meaning.

See if you can stay with the sensations…

Consider whether the area of your body your attention first went to is a source of immediate information that you rely on to make your way through the world.

Listen with ears and heart. 

Listen to yourself in the world as One Thing.

In Hebrew we would call this Shma-ing, it comes from a prayer that is recited daily during prayer services, the last words before sleep, the last words before death:

listen, you who struggle with Reality/ Reality is One thing.

Now try a few variations: it’s a bit like turning a faceted jewel that catches the light in new and surprising ways with each bit of movement.

Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, of Blessed Memory, taught there are many meanings to the word Shma found in the Talmud:

Play with substituting any of the following for the word Listen in the practice offered above, and see what you notice.

Hear                Infer                      Give evidence

Obey               Prove                    Be still

Gather            Assemble            Sing 

Minister           To Invite              Attend

Surrender        Teach                  Make music

Understand     Proclaim            Show yourself willing

Become an attendant of

Now, Hear the Great Listening that holds us all

Know also that you are listened to in the very design of things – whatever that is like with your partner or your boss or your kid, who ever the ones are in your life who don’t listen to you…

We are always surrounded by a Speaking Silence that takes in all the ways we speak – in our minds, with our hearts, with our actions. In Hebrew, the word is Chashmal…this is a Constant Presence that is always listening. This is a silence that is, as Toni Morrison notes, is little appreciated and yet “as close to music as you can get.”

Listen to birdsong if you are able. 

Listen for the vibration of thousands of feet hitting the pavement, dancing along protest routes all over the world. 

Listen for the resonances with your own life.

Let this listening be a remedy for your urgency to act, 

so you are freer to choose well. 

Let this listening be a refuge, a nourishment, a give and take.

 

Are you longing for your presence, your words, to be deeply heard, attended to, gathered? A healing and awakening relationship whose only goal is for you to become more and more yourself, as you unwind expectations – your own and others of who you are? Let’s talk.

White? Get acquainted with visceral awareness

I want to talk about what it means to be a white person “affected” by race

Since we live in a universe that is based on relationships, we are continuously affected by external factors – people and events. And we continuously affect others. In recent days we have been profoundly affected by police brutality and citizen vigilantism against black people live-streamed in real time. Weird camera angles. Anguished voices. Unrestrained brute force. Threatening use of 911.

I know that when I am affected viscerally –  I feel it in my gut –  in the internal organs of my body – something that pulls me, pulls at me, pulls me to respond. I was educated, as many of us have been,  to dissociate from such sensations, and not even notice them. To the detriment of my humanity.  It’s not a a comfortable journey to repair the severed gift of sensing the most deeply felt of human connection.

This is what civil rights organizer Ella Baker was talking about when she spoke these words, 56 years before George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer:

Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.

Benjamin Franklin understood that we humans are capable of becoming viscerally affected in this way even when it appears that we are not materially at risk:

Justice will not be served until those unaffected are as outraged as those who are.

White America has largely looked away, oblivious of our skin color except perhaps during tanning season. I first noticed I was white when I began working as a community organizer: a white suburban Jewish chick in a black church-based organization. And like other whites, largely distracted, unrepentant, believing myself to be unaffected by – and somehow both entitled to and innocent of – the inequalities that have been facts of life here for people of color for more than 400 years now. I cared deeply. The work felt intensely personal and my responsibility. I still missed the depths of suffering among my black colleagues. I missed their full humanity and because of that obliviously diminished my own.

If I am I, because you are you, and you are you, because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you, and we can talk.

American University’s Metropolitan Policy Center recently released a study of DC area residents’ views of aspects of their daily lives: shopping, talking with neighbors, sending kids to after-school programs, dealing with government agencies, encountering police. The Washington Post reported that “the biggest takeaway, and the most surprising finding,” according to the Center’s associate director, was “the rate at which white citizens of the Washington area remain unaffected by issues and concerns that vex other racial groups.”

It is our human pre-occupation with remaining at the center of our lives that keeps us from being viscerally affected and from perceiving the consequences for ourselves and for those around us.

We each look out at the world through our eyes and what we see reinforces this view. For us white Americans, everything about the way we walk through the world reinforces this: as we shop, talk to neighbors, deal with government agencies, and so on. We do not yield that space readily, or even welcome others into it. Meanwhile, our family members, neighbors, colleagues – and strangers, who have pigmented skin have a different experience. Mostly, we don’t notice. For people of color in the United States there is no negotiating civic life from the center, but only from the margins of the circle.

So - where to start, when we feel the urgency to act? And under uncertain pandemic conditions?

  • Be simple. Be ordinary. Listen to yourself. Get to know the parts of yourself. Welcome them in, whether you like them or not. Listen to others’ stories with humility, with an understanding that your version of the world is just that, your version. Some truth, some falsity, some wisdom, some foolishness. 
  • Read history you have not been taught.
  • Take small actions within your daily sphere. Practice, as Gandhi counseled: be the change you want to see in the world. 
  • Pause. Reflect. Choose what matters most. Then do things that matter to you with other people.
  • Be a listener. Listen first to yourself. Which voices are holding forth in your internal monologue? What story are they telling? Who have your inner story-tellers cast as hero, victim or villain? What are the laws of this kingdom? Where did these stories, this plot-line come from? Who taught you – explicitly or by example?  And listen to stories that seem strange and foreign
  • Wherever you are a member – a workplace, a house of worship, a book club, look out for someone who is hurting, or acting out, or looking for a place to contribute. Find small ways to partner with them.

In our privilege, fragility, tears, we white people are neither as good as we idealize ourselves to be, nor as irredeemable as we fear.

And to my black friends, I pray that the intensity of your feelings not consume you, but that you are able to harness them and use them for the good.

A healing-awakening crisis? Listen for the Source-Song

From time to time, I have to listen up: my sense of being a secure “self” living “my” life unravels and dissolves as ink in water: a healing-awakening crisis.

An encounter with realities of daily life at unexplored levels. An encounter with tangles deep in my psyche. Like the outer world as we near the solstice, a time of maximum darkness.

In this current version, my mind has a mind of its own, spinning scenarios of one disaster after another in which no part of my life survives unscathed. No cues. No script. No landmarks. A profound stimulus to my prayer life, which languishes in “better times.”

 

I listen now for “the small Blue Deer.”*  Her song, as I learned it, ordered the forces and forms of creation.

In her native language, she Is Kauyumari. She first entered my life through the music and art of her Wixaritari (Huichol) people, a small indigenous tribe living in the Sierra Madre mountains of central northwest Mexico. In the story as I heard it, the small Blue Deer sang out her mysterious song to draw all the gods near to their Source: “form and essence, light and dark, fullness and emptiness.”* Drawn together as they followed her song, the gods, who had lived “each to his own”* – spinning from one creative/sustaining/destructive act to another, much as my mind is doing this very day – settled into their places – “conscious, mysterious, and free.”* Order followed, an order where each of the gods took on the role they were meant to play.

I am grateful for Kauyumari’s calming, warming and alchemical fire as the somewhat arbitrary end of the year approaches.

 

I go quiet, go within, listen for her song within, the one that carries “all that is, and all that was, and all that will ever be.”*

It’s about really getting that I have a within. That I am not spread out all over the universe, yet have a place in it that is mine alone. Whatever it is I am here for, no one else can do/be it.

I find myself resisting a path I have taken in recent years of engaging in some well-crafted, structured self-assessment, and planning ahead. My email box is filled with hashtags for creative alignment and inspiration. I cheer their creators and subscribers along – there are so many wonderful doors to walk through. But for myself, I cringe at each new arrival, shiny with promise.

Instead I gather information about parts of my life – and my being – that I have ignored – how I have made certain choices, and how did they work out? What have been my patterns of choices? Did they bring me some of what I hoped? What about unexpected consequences?

I crave quiet.

I listen to my own voices. Some wise. Some foolish, aka human.

I am intent on discovering and claiming what wisdom I have integrated. Taken in. Digested. I am intent on discovering and claiming – even as I cringe from them – my limitations and even shame.

And I listen for the echoes of the Source-song within my voices,

even within the deep loneliness that I cannot solve. 

 

*Language in quotes are lyrics from “The Blue Deer Is,” on the CD My God is a Tree, produced by Joby Baker and Scott Sheerin  (2007).

The banner photo of the Blue Deer is a yarn painting I purchased through the Huichol Art Project, under the auspices of the Blue Deer Center, founded by Huichol elder and Plant Spirit Medicine healer Eliot Cowan.

How to sit in the dark

Insomnia taught me how to come fully alive in the night hours, how to sit in the dark.

Listen to the night-time traffic pattern, to the wind, to waves of feeling I sequestered during the day, to the ordinary.

Listen for a prompting, a question, a relaxation of muscle, intellect or heart.

Listen for Who might be listening for me.

Speak not with my tongue but some more subtle organ.

Here’s what I learned not to do: turn on a light, pick up a book, banish anxiety, get online, organize anything, expect answers. Distractions all.

Darkness is to sink into, like a seed held by soil without a tremor of urgency, the womb of time and space. Darkness, as Wendell Berry says, does its work.

These lessons of sitting in the dark strengthen me now, when so much of the shadow of the human psyche is abroad in me and in the world.

Darkness itself is sentient, full of knowing, and able to awaken, as we come into relationship with her.

As I wrestle with the sea changes in the US and around the world, I am more aware than ever of my own shadow being, and how vital it is for me to continue my “night-time” work, then bring it out as I engage with the daylight world.

While the days have begun to lengthen now,

may we be willing to continue laboring in the dark,

may we come to appreciate its value,

may we be resolute,

may we hold hands,

may we lift up one another as we stumble.

 

The morning after: a 21st century creation story

As I write and post this week, election results are unknown. Regardless of outcome, many challenges and opportunities await us. We will feel them with differing senses of urgency.

We wonder: are we, individually and collectively, up to what is being asked of us? 

Here’s why my answer is, unequivocally, YES.

YES, even though we are tired and may wisely “unplug” to recuperate.

YES, even though the work to come is demanding, daunting, and unending, and I tremble in my bones.

BECAUSE from our deepest roots we are fashioned to create, and to create together.

We create as effortlessly as we breathe, as continuously as our hearts beat. We are forever engaged in materializing our feelings, thoughts, and ideas, our hopes, expectations, visions, and fears.

We shape the material world with our hands and with their extensions, tools and technologies of all kinds. We put foods and spices together and call it cooking. We put words together and call it story-telling, or news, or nonsense, or poetry. We put wood and stone and metal together and call it building. There is no end to this.

Sometimes just walking around my local super-market, I am overwhelmed at the number of products to choose from. In a kitchen store, I find a new gadget and wonder if someone woke up in the middle of the night seized with excitement about designing a cutting tool that turns a zucchini or a beet into lovely spirals with which to top a salad or frittata.

We filter what we see: we perceive selectively. We fill in blanks. Early in life we use the material that has been given to us – the gifts and limitations of our parents as caregivers, the security or the chaos of our circumstances – to create a story, a life, in which we have as much safety as we can construct. We include, we distort, we omit. We write in heroes and villains, friends, allies, and enemies.

As we grow up, we continue to elaborate on these stories. We live them. We project them more or less onto whatever landscapes, encounters, and personalities make up our days.

These are our personal creation stories: our family origins.

The smaller, the more fixed our stories, the more we live in a trance state, a default state defined by habit, the less freedom we have.

The same is true of our cultural stories, our group identities, our biases, our views of what is “normal” speech, body language, and behavior.

When we are lucky – we can join this kind of tribe: we begin to wake up and see how our stories have become unconscious and self-perpetuating mechanisms that drive our lives and our communities. We begin to question our habitual ways of responding to the world. We wake up to the ways our personal and cultural stories have become prisons. We break out (commonly with the help of others who live their lives outside of our story), and tell a new – and often bigger one, with previously unimagined possibilities. And then we can change the institutions and systems built on those old stories, and create together for the common good.

We listen attentively to one another’s stories. We take them in. Together we cry, together we laugh.

Can you catch the scent of freedom here? get hold of the thread of what it might mean to be a conscious creator of your own life, an artist of your soul? a collaborative architect of your community? an awakening builder of our world?

We are a growing tribe, on the move and gaining strength.

So take heart. Offer comfort and kind words. Receive solace. Share the Kleenex around if need be, in grief or in relief. Let us strengthen our personal resolve and our shared humanity.

Then: take one step. Start anywhere:

There is no better morning to wake up. Today: question just one perspective, break just one habit, open to just one new possibility.

No better morning to make something whole in yourself.  Today: pick just one limitation that bugs you. Take your first few steps down a path that embraces both self-acceptance and self-improvement, so that this limitation is no longer an obstacle, just something that shapes you in a particular way, like a tree shaped by wind.

No better morning to practice. Today: be willing. Persist. Move with the movement of life.

No better moment to claim your place in the human tribe.

Photo credit: Up in Arms, by Linda Carmel, at Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough, NC