a practice of listening
I have admittedly not been very good at writing these Substacks. I don’t expect you to notice- we’ve all got plenty to focus on. But as a writer, being at a loss for words is something I can easily worry over.
I’ve been writing - I notice I want to say that almost defensively (I’m still a writer, I still write!) And it’s true - I’m still a writer, I still write. I’ve been working with an organization called Medicinal Media, writing scripts for short form videos that expand the definition of what qualifies as a video on somatics, and it’s been a pure joy to write in that way (here’s a lovely video filmed in South Korea using a script I wrote about cherry blossoms). I’ve written a few Instagram posts I’m pleased with. I’ve certainly been writing emails, and I’d love to write less of them to be honest, but I’ve managed to even write to my email list, even if that’s mostly to make sure people who have asked to know what I’m up to do in fact know (mainly a lot of book tour events, which I very much love). But long-form writing, which Substack qualifies as, has been eluding me. People are asking if I’m already writing my next book, and I can barely even manage to find 200 words to string together.
I have instead been trying to listen. I am listening in the form of reading, using that everyday magic of words on a page that somehow translate into sound in my own inner world. I’ve been letting myself be transformed by writers I admire, currently devoting my time to reading Ross Gay and Micheal Ende and Michela Murgia and Alice Hoffman and Madeline L’Engle - and if you notice in that list that they are almost all fiction writers and the only won who isn’t (Ross Gay) is a poet of such skill so as to create entire worlds to swim and play in, you will perhaps understand a bit of what I’ve been feeling. Fiction and poetry have been all I’ve wanted to read, and as a non-fiction writer it is feeling quite difficult to find the words for these moments, now close to 250 days from the start of the genocide in Gaza.
It makes sense, I suppose, that if I have to write those words as a writer of non-fiction, that I would struggle to find any others.
The other week in Anchor Community, a somatic learning space I have thankfully been leading consistently since 2018 (oh the prescience in naming something an Anchor before 2020 arrived and ripped the shore from under us) we were exploring the somatics of listening. It isn’t the first time we have done this - after all, in this many years of continuous somatic practice, it is hard to find anything new to do. But that’s the magic of somatics. We don’t do new things. We do very ancient things, in new ways, because we are constantly new. Even if that is hard to feel, 236 days from the start of one genocide, hundreds of years from the start of others.
In that session we were practicing listening, inspired by my current re-reading (perhaps for the 20th time) of Momo, by Micheal Ende, a book written ostensibly for children, which really means it is able to go quickly into the heart of the biggest questions, and the question this book dives into is the question of time, and life, and what it means to truly be present with each other and with the whole of the world. (That is one way to summarize it - catch me on a different day and I might give you an entirely different summary. But that’s a pretty good one.)
In the second chapter, Ende describes Momo’s ability to listen. “Anyone can listen, you might say, what’s so special about that? And you’d be wrong” he writes. And he goes on to describe how Momo, a strange little girl who randomly shows up at the outskirts of the poor part of town, can listen so profoundly that people are able to know themselves, strokes of insight come to even the most muddle-minded, and that someone who feels like they don’t matter at all suddenly realize that they are in fact unique, and so they matter in their own unique way. She even listens to the stars, and is able to hear the music that emanates from them. (And because of this power of listening, she is the only one who is able to save the world from the clutches of the men in grey, time thieves, but I won’t say any more about it because I really hope that this is enough to convince you to just go ahead and read it.)
A few week ago in Anchor, I read parts of that chapter, and we practiced listening as a somatic practice. Which can be a little trickier than it might seem, because somatics, like most things that have been appropriated and westernized, is often practiced with the idea that we will get something. More calm, perhaps. A better night’s sleep, maybe. Even, and this is a noble effort to be sure, increased capacity to be present with the world as it is in all its deepest grief and horrors, while still being able to be present with the beauty that thankfully, surrounds many of us still (I just saw a video of Israeli soldiers shooting rounds of machine gun fire under the most gorgeous sunset and I will admit, even with all my years of practice at holding the paradox of horror and beauty, that was more than I know how to handle.)
In practicing listening as a somatic practice, we are very much not trying to get anything. The moment we are trying to get something, we have stopped listening. Even if what we are trying to get is a deeper understanding, there’s still a goal there. A worthy one! One we need! But this is something different. This is a release of goals, which, to a mind cultured into a world where goals are the entire point and purpose of living (Ende talks about this very well too) is very difficult to do. Which is why it’s important to practice.
In this practice with the beautiful people of Anchor, many of whom I’ve never met in “real” life but have seen week after week for years in this space, it suddenly struck me that when I am talking to someone and they very clearly aren’t listening - they’re looking at their phone, maybe, or waiting for their turn to jump in, or even just agreeing to everything I say which means I don’t actually feel heard at all - when that happens, a few other things happen. One of them being that I likely don’t like that person very much, maybe just in that moment, maybe from now on, and I certainly would hesitate before seeking them out in the future. The other thing that happens, and this is the one that hit me like the proverbial punch to the gut, is that I feel profoundly lonely. It’s incredibly lonely to have people pretend to listen. To anyone who has ever been around me when I’ve been too distracted to really listen, or when I’ve only just been waiting for my turn to speak - I am so sorry. I hope you can forgive me; I hope I will do better next time.
But here we are, so many of us, not really listening to….well, to anything. Not very well to each other, not very well to the natural world, not very well to our own inner worlds even - which are different from the voices that drone on ad nauseum, keeping us from listening to anything else. We might hear things, but listening - the real kind - requires a release of all goals and any urgency, and we are on the whole not very good at that. Or I should be more clear and take better responsibility - I am not very good at that. I have my moments, to be sure, but mostly, my mind is trying to figure out what comes next (when will I get the idea that will become my next book? Is there something important or interesting I can say here? Is there something important or interesting I need to say so that everyone knows I am in fact an interesting person? And what about that thing that other person said to me that other time and the things I need to say to them about that…and so on and so on)
And it struck me, in this practice of listening, just how lonely the world must be feeling, never being listened to.
So I have been trying to do that more. I’ve been trying to listen, really listen, without a goal or even the intention of understanding - to the birds, to the wind, to the flowers in the garden, to my own aching and repeatedly broken heart. It currently means I have not been writing as much, although at its best, writing is a form of listening and maybe I’m breaking through enough of the shells my success has put on me to be able to listen like that again now. Maybe not. Only time will tell.
Thank you for reading. I hope to have more to say sometime soon.
