‘Listening brings humans into being.’
Lisbeth Lipari
When we care deeply about the world, we may find ourselves spending a lot of time and effort “taking a stand”; proclaiming, explaining, demonstrating, propagating, asserting, and declaring just where we’ve gone wrong, and (sometimes) how we might find a different path forward.
This is undeniably a necessary part of shifting the patterns we are locked into. (I mean, this is coming from someone who puts a great deal of effort into trumpeting out words on this very topic into the podcast ether every other week!). But in our busyness to fix things, perhaps we forgot that another response to our predicament may also be adequate: just listening.
Of course we do a great deal of listening all the time; to the often depressing news in the car radio, to the podcasts constantly streaming into our earbuds, to Youtube videos on anything from Gaza to mass extinction. Speaking from my own experience, I find this type of listening easily descends into a passive consumption of content. Often it can’t be categorised as listening at all.
In this episode we try to explore the true potency of listening – the listening that is done with the heart, often in conversation, and where the voices we listen to are not necessarily human.
Keri Facer is a dear friend who I love exploring the Forest of Thought with. She’s a professor of Educational and Social Futures, but also a storyteller, and she regularly holds spaces for conversation through a practice called Ways of Council. The last time I interviewed Keri, we met in the local forest to talk about how shifting our understanding of time can open up possibilities for different futures to emerge1. This week’s conversation took us even deeper into that same local forest, gathering around a campfire with a small group of co-conspirators to explore listening and what it might mean to us.2
A story that beautifully brings together the two themes of time and listening is Momo and the Times Thieves (1972) by Michael Ende. In it we meet the young girl Momo who makes herself a home in an abandoned amphitheater. She soon becomes indispensable to her new neighbours and friends. They notice that their troubles and woes seem to dissolve in her presence. Why? Was she particularly good at giving advice, had clever opinions, or knew the most consoling words? No, Momo didn’t have any particular gifts. Except for one thing…
“What little Momo could do like no other was: listen. Some might think that is nothing special – listening – why – anyone can do that. But that is not true. Very few people are capable of really listening. […] Momo could listen so that people who thought they were stupid found themselves thinking very clever thoughts. Not really because she had said or asked something that had prompted these thoughts, no, she simply sat there and listened with great attention and care. All the while she would look at you with her large dark eyes and you would suddenly feel thoughts emerging that you never realised were in you. […]3
Such was Momo’s ability to listen!”
In the episode, Keri talks about Lisbeth Lipari’s assertion that when we truly listen, something happens that is not from you or me; something else is brought into being. While we often see listening as something passive, Lipari (and Momo) remind us that it has the potential to be a very creative practice.
And I would claim it is a subtle art. There is no easy recipe that inevitably brings us into listening’s deepest powers (although there certainly are ingredients that increase the likelihood of it happening). And yet we can all recognise it when it happens. Perhaps real listening is the secret powder that can be sprinkled on any conversation to yield it more alive – even magical?
As we gathered round the campfire, the crows decided to make a few comments. Again, we can learn from Momo:
Momo listened to all, to dogs and cats, to crickets and toads, yes even to the rain and the wind in the trees. And all spoke to her in its own way. Some evenings when all her friends had returned home, she sat alone for a long time in the big stone round of the old theatre above which the star-sparkling sky concaved, and she simply listened to the great silence.
Then it appeared to her as if she sat in the midst of a giant ear drum that listened out into the world of the stars. And it appeared to her as if she heard a quiet and enormous music that found its way strangely into her heart. On such nights she had particularly wonderful dreams.
And if you still think listening is nothing special, then go try if you can do it like that.
I hope you enjoy the conversation4. Cloudy November greetings to you all,
Ingrid
LINKS TO THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT:
Keri’s paper “Beyond voice: Listening and silence in climate change education”
Momo by Michael Ende
The framing for the conversation was based on this paper by Keri.
It goes on like this: “Momo could listen in a way that people who felt lost or undecided all of a sudden knew exactly what they wanted. She could listen so that shy people suddenly felt free and brave. Or unhappy and depressed ones would feel confident and happy. And if someone thought their life was useless and meaningless, he himself only one in a million, one who doesn’t count and who can be replaced as easily as a broken pot – if he went and told Momo, small Momo, while he was talking he would realise in the most wondrous way that he was totally wrong, that he himself, exactly as he was, was unlike any other human being and therefore special to the world in his own special way.”
And thanks to CEMUS at Uppsala University and Society for Transformative Conversations at the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences for co-hosting this event!
