Listening Beyond Your Mind
Hello Reader
This week let’s explore how little excursions with hearing & listening can be the brain salve we crave.
If you’re enjoying these simple weekly touch points with nature, I’d appreciate your support: invite a friend to join us as a subscriber/reader/nature-curious explorer!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Founder, Ordinary Nature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Weekly Reflection 👂🐦🍃
- Weekly Practice 🌳✨
- Little Tender Things 💚
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Listening Beyond Your Mind
Jennifer Ruth Keller
This morning I did the thing I try to do most every day: I get up, make coffee, and go out to the five pines in our backyard. There is no agenda, no special breathing. I greet them. They greet me. And, in a way, we hang out for about 10-15 minutes.
I’m reticent to call this a “routine” because that sounds so responsible. I stumbled into the series of actions–and, decidedly, non-action–a few years ago. I go to the trees first thing, simply because it seems to make the rest of life go better.
Today, in the full flush of spring, when I walked outside in the morning my attention caught first on the chatter of birds in the pines. High up, in one tree in the middle. And then, as my hearing dilated to take in the fuller scene, I listened to birds communicating all around–between the pines, across the yard from the maple to the pines, at the edges in the row of shaggy arbor vita.
While I do at some level make the choice to go outside first thing, what I love most is how, once outside, I’m whisked beyond the human realm of choice and decision. My ears perk up at the bird calls, the gentle attending through listening instantly transports me outside my brain and whatever loops of thought it awoke to.
When you listen capaciously, with an open allowance for whatever sounds arise around you, you can’t not expand your field of experience. Thoughts inside the mind become suspended, or bracketed. Sound calls us into the bigger relational world.
It’s such a simple thing, even an obvious thing. This morning as the sun warmed my skin and I listened to the birds in the branches it was like re-learning the lesson all over again, with a refreshed delight of surprise: “Oh, yes — all these other voices give me a break from the repetitive worries in my mind.”
And then, the cool effect: As my mind gains some reprieve, as I come more into relationship with the sounds around me, what’s interior to me becomes more right-sized, so to speak.
It isn’t that my interior voice becomes erased. It’s more that it gains some spaciousness in which it can clamor less, and breathe a bit easier. It doesn’t have to compete for dominant space, because it’s being held and experienced as one voice within a world of other voices.
The myopia of worry dissipates, and for a stretch of minutes I get to enjoy the song and chatter of birds around me, with me, beyond me.
WEEKLY PRACTICE INVITATION
The what: Sonic Spring Exploration
This one’s a fun one! It works best if you’re able to do this mostly with your eyes closed, so please do sit down if that allows you to steady your body while you’re exploring.
Once you’re in your outdoor setting, and your body is settled, set a timer for 10 minutes.
Draw upon your sense of hearing to learn where you are and who is with you. It can help to move (through your hearing!) in a 360° circle or field around your body, little by little, slowly.
What sounds do you notice?
Do any sounds repeat? Draw you in? Call to you? Confuse you? Delight you?
If you mapped where you are through sound, what might that be like?
When your 10 minutes are up, and you open your eyes, let yourself have a few minutes to bask in the sound spell. If the clamor of the day starts to creep in later, you can return to the felt memory of this sound spell.
Locals: May 1st & 2nd – Free Workshop @ the Conscious Living Expo!
LITTLE TENDER THINGS
Handmade nest,
fit for a queen
hummingbird,
please let the winds
not knock you down,
let the branches
protect you, for a season.
