My friend Dianne studies the earth, literally. She was an Earth Sciences Prof at the U of Calgary for many years, researching environmental sustainability in Canada. She knows how the ground and the air and the humans and the coyotes and the long grasses all connected because she attends to them and she reads what other experts have learned. She speaks with such wonder at how it all works. How the earth longs to be known. And like anything born, and reborn, and reborn, it wants to reveal itself. But it won’t force you. It waits until you are listening. Dianne taught me to listen to the earth.
For all the lectios led, sermons written, sacraments passed out, for all the tongues and tremors I’ve experienced, I find I keep coming back to this one practice she gave me. There’s something about it that has stayed close to my core; that I need to ground every other spiritual practice I engage in.
She taught me to sit in one spot and listen to the world around my body. She taught me to attend to a moment, not to get something out of it, but to just witness it.
Instructions:
Sit in one spot. Pay attention. What do you hear?
Attend to the sounds, picking them out and turning them over like you did with rocks when you were young.
Then ask yourself:
What’s making that sound? What direction is the sound is coming from? What is its’ tone? Pitch? Volume? Is it pleasant or does it grate? Is it coming from a place above you or below? When does the sound stop and when do new sounds arise? How does the sound strike your body? Does it lap up to your feet? Does it pierce your thoughts? Does it flit down from the sky or rumble up from a depth you didn’t know was there?
And then mark it all down on a piece of paper. With a pen, pencil or crayon even. Draw it out. Put yourself on the paper and image the sounds as they happen around you. With symbols of your own making, draw a map of the truth of that moment perceived by your ears. Mark the birds and the wind and the jackhammer and the joggers with little pictures as you like. Locate yourself within this tapestry of living that you are not making happen.
Listen. To those who have ears, let them be. Hear.
The wonder of this practice is that it doesn’t aim to grab an insight. Or achieve a specific state of mind. It is not meant to level up my leadership or my writing or my parenting of my living. It is enough to marvel at what is. Just being in this body in this layered world is enough. Enough to get me to start to trust enough to actually hear what’s always being said.
*****
I’ve been longing to hear in this liminal space of transition I am in. Hear myself, hear my longing, hear the truthiest truth which is always found closest to the ground. Hear God. There are so many loud voices and I am one of them and the last few years have left my ears ringing. But it takes time and practice - not just ears - to hear the needed slow down, the necessary leavings, the small things that are true things lapping up against my own body. And I have gotten out of the habit. The benefits of getting older is that I don’t feel shame about this - it just is what it is because life was what it was for a few hard years. And it was busy and big and hard and beautiful. And still my body longs to hear more truth and less fury. So I’m listening to it.
In liminal spaces, where ‘what once was’ and ‘what will be’ meet and mix and your next right step isn’t exactly apparent, we need to hone our hearing. And stop talking louder. And yet talking louder is what we keep trying to offer to each other. Maybe we just want to be understood and liminal times are confusing at best, terrifying at worst. We love our hold on reality - especially if it comes with power and a promise of control. We don’t like it to change but we just don’t want to be alone. So we are yelling to try to make each other understand or at the very least make the world stop. And yet liminal spaces are profoundly unsettling and needfully so. Next steps have to be determined with new information and a deep awareness of where you are and what is around you. “What has always been done” will not get you to where you are going. Yelling and selling at everyone (and yourself) will not help. Culturally, spiritually, we are in liminal spaces and we require every sense we have to meet what waits over that threshold. We need to hone our hearing.
The word for obedience in the new testament is actually the word for listening. And while obedience has become a word too often used like a weapon to keep a lot of people from saying a good and holy no, sowing distrust of our own senses and self and God - listening is a connecting word. A word that honours the senses and the one who uses them. A word that needs an ear to hear, not just a programmable blank slate. A word that reveals truth slowly but incredibly surely, from the ground up. If we have any hope of being obedient to the truth and not just to whoever shouts the loudest, we must listen with our actual bodies and souls. The liminal is no place for hubris. So I listen, not to gain, not to transcend myself, not to leave my senses or to vacate my own being but to locate the truth of the world as it meets my own body. To know the layers in which I belong. To hear something real. And then….maybe….to respond.
“God is not elsewhere,” St. Benedict wrote. God is speaking wind and bird and jackhammer and joggers. God is speaking soul and longing and stomach growls and creaks at the back of the neck. God is speaking rumbles and shrieks and it’s coming from the sky but also….also God is at the bottom of your very root in this world. Right where the seeds crack open in the dark. And this is why I listen - because its probably still too dark to see clearly.
A prayer:
For ears to hear around me but also inside me. For ears that prick up when something new comes close and can tell threat from friend. For ears to lead me to wonder and to hear words of mercy. For ears to hear who is actually calling in the dark.
And for trust to turn towards what I hear with welcome.
God in us, the hope of glory, help us hear.
And thank you for Dianne.
And here is a link to a couple favourite songs that keeps coming up from the ground when I encounter those threshold moments. Listening aids….