another post from the book....

this is a section I wrote on listening, enjoy!: Listening is fodder My advice to any human being, be they artistic or not, is to listen. Set all the buzzing and linear communication aside for a minute and listen. Turn off the screen and listen. Set aside your business and listen. Listen quietly. Listen intently. Listen to the underlying hum of all creation. The underlying force by which all things are created and through which all things fall off and die. If you live a life of constant noise, you’ll find the sound of silence deafening. Make room for it. It’s calling you into greater existence. It is the sound of the wind moving through the field. The sound of your ancient ancestor’s voices and hands moving in shadows below your feet. The sound of eons of ice and sun and flood and rain over the land. The sound of vapor and molecules coagulating into some primordial stew of your existence. It is a still small voice, yet all the force of nature and the supernatural moving in unison through the recesses of time. It is the sound of your history, your future, and your present. You were born by it, and into it you shall return. Release your fear of the unknown, because the unknown is already here, awaiting your company, sitting quietly, inviting you to “come in, and know me better man!” (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol). Now that you’ve enlightened yourself, little grass hopper, let sensei help you lift up your eyes and guide you on your journey. Raise your head. Look up and look around. Look upon the waves and crowds of humanity. Listen for the common thread among us all, the hum of life and community we bring to this earth. The good we contain and the corrupt we fall under. Sift through us, one by one, like grains of sand, and listen to our voices cry out for mercy, love, and tenderness. Hear how each of us yearns for purpose and desire. See us as the blades of grass in the field. The sheaves of wheat swaying in the wind. Handle us with care, we are fragile creatures, bending and breaking under your palms. Treat us with the utmost honor, for our lives are short and strenuous. We are caught in some great cosmic battle of our existence. Some of us benefitted from a roll of the dice, some suffer from it, either way, we are all playing the same game, on the same board, with the same resources. All is play, all is folly. Yet the things of reality exist somewhere in our roots, and they coexist with us for all eternity. In the end, it will not matter who won the game, and who lost, but how it was played. Pull yourself away for an instant and see the big picture. The entire game board moving and shuffling. So tiny and small, yet 7 billion strong and growing. We are but a fragment, a tiny sliver of life on a small rock, revolving and rotating around a tiny spec in the universe called the sun, with eons and eons of cold, dark space surrounding us. Remove yourself from the chessboard for a moment and see how the world turns without you. The game continues on, the pieces shuffle back and forth, the dice roll and stay, roll and stay. You are small, insignificant, and that’s ok. Recognizing your insignificance and unimportance is the first step in overcoming your fear of silence. “I went digging, through the mines of my own soul. The wellsprings of my own mind. And in those dark chambers I found coal. That dark soft powdery stone, bound up in the walls, set upon the hallways of my own psyche. But yet farther down and deeper still. I found something of greater pleasure. of greater worth. I found diamond, and yes, I found you.” If you are still unconvinced, let me appeal to your self-interest: Listening will improve your work tenfold. If you lack material, you need to listen, warehouse upon warehouse of good things lie down there, dormant in the people around you. You need to start digging if you want to find it. A few years ago, a mentor of mine approached me with a concern for my listening skills. With words as precise and sharp as a surgeon’s knife, she told me I was not really hearing people and my communication could, at times, be selfish, awkward, and flat. Under her advice and care, I began to work on and sharpen my listening skills. My eyes were opened in a way I had not seen before and I was enlightened into a whole new world. A world where reality exists with or without me and where we all gather at the same table with layers and layers of unspoken history. We are all waiting to unfold and unclasp our true selves, but it takes patience, selflessness, and mercy, slowly walking side by side with us, slowly unwinding the noose around our neck. Like a wild animal trapped in barb wire, a little tenderness and finesse (over brute force) helps us loosen the grip and regain our freedom. My mentor instructed me to listen objectively and empathetically. To listen with purpose and intent. To listen without judgement and to listen before being listened to. Eventually, she encouraged me to become mature enough to solicit advice and critique of my own person. ...her advice has caused the single most impact in my life. Somehow, for so many years, I had missed it. I had spent countless hours critiquing movies, paintings, politics, theology, music, books, and my work only to leave the canvas of my own person dry and empty. Somehow I had missed the greatest arena of intellect and creativity, my own soul. In that place, I found truth and I found it in abundance, yet much of my existence had been masked in lies and misconceptions before that. Truth and reality are a composite picture, a mosaic of faces, rather than a funneled down single notion. Truth is hands, feet, body, and head all in congruent motion. Truth is a personality, it has a face....you can look into it’s eyes and understand it. “Hey modern man, wake up!”: Communication between two people is not going from point A (diagram needed?)-----------------------------to -------------------------------->point B It is not a one way street of verbal diarrhea. Our ways of understanding each other in our present culture has caused us to suffer greatly. We should limit our one-track, linear conversation, to questions like, “where’s the bathroom?”, or “how do I cook pasta?”. In fact, there are enough search engines on our mobile devices to entertain us for hours with these kinds of quarries. Sure, if someone wants to talk about the weather, that’s fine, we need to ease into it somehow. But by no means have we begun to understand true communication between each other as human beings. We need to begin to ask each other questions, hard questions, questions that make us vulnerable and help us understand the reality we live in. We are out of touch with ourselves. We’ve lost the capacity to know each other individually and uniquely. We don’t need more neighborhood watches or nosey citizens with guns. We don’t need anymore young adult males destroying our lives with assault rifles. We don’t need another broker sliding a shady deal across our table, or men with bombs in their backpacks. We don’t need anymore political gridlock, or gutless rich people. We need no more protests, or propaganda, or running of the bulls through convenience stores on black friday. We need people with honor, and courage to stand up and begin to listen. To knock on their neighbor’s doors, to sit beside their coworkers, to hold their gaze on each other and begin to truly, emphatically listen. But of course, if you only see people as ways of getting things for yourself, then carry on as you were, you’re probably no fun to be around, you’ll find out someday you’re a jerk. Maybe someone with guts and integrity will tell you so. Or maybe the wreckage of your own life will start to smell so badly under the floorboards, even you won’t be able to hide it anymore. True communication is messy. It’s relationship, and there is no predictability involved. In fact, this may be what makes it so appealing. I’ve seen some crazy shit on TV. People climbing deadly cliffs, skydiving off mountaintops, wrestling slimy, teethy creatures, punching each other out, making trick shots off the backboard, breaking violin strings, eating insects...gaining ground and insight and prowess into every aspect of the human body and modern technology. And there we sit, watching, voyeurs with clamoring endorphins and nervous, static adrenaline. But, honestly, I’d rather strap on a squirrel suit and free fall off a mountain precipice than develop deep relationship with someone. It gives me the cold sweats to meet over coffee or a beer, to ask hard questions that lead to hard answers. To open the hood of someone else’s life and mess with the machinery. It’s not easy, it’s not concise, it’s not pretty. Its grey, it’s crude, it’s beautiful....there is no greater rush, no greater high than knowing others and being known by them. If you want to heal from your own wounds, walk out and through the healing of others. You will find your redemption lies in small pieces throughout the souls of all of us. You will see that meandering with me through my life, will bring change and healing in yours. If you want to know yourself as you truly are, walk with me and know me as I truly am. We are not journeying in a straight line, but a wondering path, and there is no predicting where it leads, only that we are walking together, in the now, stopping occasionally to admire the scenery and/or repair the trail. Our path is not straight forward, it is not linear, sometimes it isn’t even clear, it simply is. As long as you and me breath together and have the capacity to communicate, we are in it. We are bound for glory and it’s a big shitty mess of a way. But we are bound by the things that matter: trust, compassion, love, and honesty. Although our path is winding and circular, we are committed to knowing each other in the highest of possibilities, the highest of plains, the highest of potentials: we are bound together in a way which brings clarity and insight into the “why?” of our existence. We are bound for greater things. We are the living imprint, the carbon copy of our great and mighty creator. (diagram to finish.....a bird’s eye view of a labyrinth)