A snippet from a post I read on Facebook:
“In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars.
At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow.
For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest sickness of all.”
A comment on the thread of the shared post:
I wonder if some of us, maybe most of us, are too far gone to be able to connect to nature again. Short of going out into the wilderness alone and completely unplugged, how, how, HOW do we come back to that state of being?
A comment that hung on to me, and so today, I write.
A Western World Dwellers Prescription For Listening To Stars
1.
A cup of True enough, with large spoonful of Belief
I was staying in a hotel in Portland when I picked up a copy of Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke The Plant. My room overlooked a carpark that was ringed by a number of shops, one of which included a huge Barnes and Noble bookstore that became my hiding place and respite from the busy-ness of the outside. I’d heard mention of this book before, so I added it to my pile of purchases- which were many- and made my way back to the hotel.
I remember the exact place I was when I read this. It was one of those moments that shifts your perspective on its axis. Monica talked about how our current scientific understandings of sentience and intelligence are based around the necessary presence of a brain and a nervous system. Her studies with plants suggested that they too live and operate with profound intelligence, even though the mechanisms at play are fundamentally different to how humans and animals operate.
Her findings were controversial and not necessarily well received in scientific circles. Accepting them, naturally, involved a paradigm shift; a reconfiguration of thinking requiring us to acknowledge the intelligence of organisms outside the brain and nervous system model.
In other words, a letting go of what we know to be true and a making space for the possibility that a whole other world exists that is foreign to the metrics of what is currently measured, understood, and controlled.
For Monica’s scientific colleagues, one of the most confronting things about her studies was how she conducted her research. Instead of setting out with an idea that she would then seek to prove, she simply observed. In essence, her experiments were a series of open ended questions and she allowed what wanted to be shown to find her, without any sense of certainty or attachment to what, if anything, would present.
She knew that something was happening. She just didn’t know exactly what.
What Monica dedicated herself to was not to hearing, but to listening.
And in the process, her whole world opened up.
***
What moved me so much about reading this book was not so much the information. Instead, it was confirmation of something we innately know to be true, even if the rational and sensible world is yet to validate our intuitive knowing with the data.
Of course this non-human, vegetal and arboreal world is intelligent.
Of course it is.
Of course, even the non-human world of the animal is more intelligent than we give it credit for. There are naturally other mechanisms of knowing that exist.
Of course, of course, of course.
So what’s my point? How does this relate to your desire- our desire- to listen to the stars?
I wonder, Dear Person That Also Wonders, if the problem lies in being someone who seeks to hear, rather than someone who seeks to listen?
I wonder, if you became someone who listens to stars, rather than someone who hears the stars, what difference that would make?
To listen is a generative act. It exists separate to the certainty of hearing.
If we dedicate ourselves to the process of listening, then are we not, by default saying to ourselves:
I believe there’s something to be heard.
And beyond that, maybe it’s the practice of star listening itself, the process of star listening, that holds the benefit, rather than the need to hear the result?
I wonder, what if stars weren’t listenable? But we believed them to be?
What else might we discover in the process of attempting to listen?
What else might we find on that adventure?
And beyond that, is it not the process of believing- the believing itself- rather than the who or the what, that is the cure?
An elixir to the heart, a love letter to the universe that knows there is more to the world around us than what we currently experience.
The clay of our body tells us:
It’s your birth right to listen to the stars.
We know this, no matter where it is we’ve strayed.
Is it not our knowing that asks the question to begin with?
Believing I can hear the stars, choosing to believe that to be true, adds something to my life.
It enhances my sense of connection.
Commits me to acts of daily beauty seeking.
Fills me with a sense of wonder for something that exists beyond myself.
What good does it do us to deny that?
The humility of wondering, and at the same time knowing, there is always something to be heard.
2.
1 ½ Cups of Welcoming The Gladness. Add liberal amounts of Staying Open hearted Within The Complexities of Life as needed.
At the beginning of the year, I lost a being I was very close to, my horse Bear. His death was not a slow and peaceful one. Instead it was torrid and traumatic and upsetting and not at all befitting the ending that a creature of such benevolence deserved.
But in the days that followed, something interesting happened. I shared my story of Bear, poured my heart into my writing, not as a quest for sympathy, but in tribute. In tribute to the simplicity of his life, and the deep and lasting impact it had on mine. The many conversations I had on and with death did something unexpected; they further enhanced life.
Experiences of death have the curious effect of magnifying your aliveness. You realise- or are perhaps reminded- of how death and life do not exist as separate poles. That they’re not a linear game, with a beginning and an end.
Instead, as you look around, you realise that death and life are intermeshed.
That death and life hang in the leaves of the same tree. That the very thing that supports you underfoot, that carries you through life, is a combination of composting detritus, the residue of life that forms the very earth, now, in death.
Have you noticed, that in your darkest moments, perhaps even your greatest traumas, how close you’re pulled in towards the curtain?
How you see with a different sharpness, even if what you see appears confusing?
That it’s when you’re on your knees that you really feel the limits of this animal body; how close you are to nature; how fine the edge is that we walk on every day; how close we always are to falling, a noticing so many of us have comforted out of our awareness.
And how many of us, in this state, when our chests are unzipped, our hearts bare to the world, how many of us continue to welcome in the gladness?
Welcoming the gladness means that we’re open to receiving, even in the midst of pain, discomfort and confusion. Even, perhaps, because of it.
Nick Cave talks about the irritation of the world being persistently beautiful when there’s so much suffering going on around us, on both a personal and wider, global level. That this is the hardest thing we find in grief to reckon with.
So why this conversation? And what does it have to do with listening to the stars?
To be open to the universe- and what more tangible manifestation can we speak of than the stars?- requires us to hold all the forces of being human, without them hardening our shell and closing us down.
When we believe we can block out the forces that cause us pain, we block out the forces that bring us joy.
In short, we forget to listen, and begin only to control.
Being human, and being open to the gladness means carrying the expectation of heartbreak and heartache, and staying open anyway.
When we say, we expect to be taken down. And we stay open anyway.
When we say, we expect to have our hearts broken. And we stay open anyway.
When we say, we expect to get it wrong. And we stay open anyway.
If we can stay with the experience, and move through it, the experience itself creates an immediacy to life. Where the constant experience of change and flux become nothing more than confirmation of humanity, our practice ground for micro-dosing death in a way that maintains liveability, humility and aliveness.
And it’s in this state:
Where the heartbreak sits alongside all the joy.
Where the loss holds hand with all the love.
Where the unfulfilled desires meet the being-lived adventures..
… that the opening for wonder first appears.
Then you can sit, look up, and see stars hanging against the black like animated questions.
Not offering promises or certainty, but all at once infinitely generous and utterly ungraspable.
Maybe then, we can forget about our knowing. Maybe then, we can let go of our controlling.
Maybe then, we can look up, reach out and let all our facts take flight.
3.
A tablespoon of Prayers to the Ancestors
When I was pregnant with my eldest child, I had a dream. I was sitting around a table, shaped like a half moon. At various points sat the women of my maternal line. No one looked familiar. Skin shades of many colours. Faces of many ages. Bodies of different builds and shapes. I could not find the likeness of my face amongst them. And yet I knew our connection to be true.
In this moment, I was sitting with my ancestors.
I undid my belly like a pouch, placed my as yet unborn baby on the table. They picked him up, cradled him gently, and looked at me with a direct, unbroken gaze.
He is a child of the light, they told me. Take good care of him.
When they handed my baby back, I panicked, did not know what to do. Here he was on the outside- I had no idea how to put him back.
They smiled and said I could do so with my intention.
I relaxed, open the pouch of my belly.
My baby returned to the depths inside my womb.
***
In the many years since, I have found comfort in this dream. In the thought that I am part of a maternal line, full of names I don’t know and perhaps never will. But the not knowing does not cancel out their presence.
I wonder, if our biggest challenge is getting beyond the rational. The we’ve developed a deficit of trust in intuition and imagination being a legitimate source.
Just as our ancestral heritage cannot be denied, our cosmological heritage is one that still rings true. The stars- understanding them, being guided by then, finding shapes and patterns in them- is as present in our bodies as the people who read them. A cosmological heritage.
David Abrams describes imagination as the gift we have to throw ourselves forward of reality; a reaching of the hand through the curtain in an attempt to make contact with something we cannot yet perceive, to extend us beyond the limits of the rational and the sensible.
I wonder what this requires. It seems to me it’s nothing more than the willingness to do so.
The willingness to imagine yourself as someone that listens to stars.
The willingness to be someone who asks the question, what would it be like to be a person who hears them?
I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars takes the time to hear what they have to say.
I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars seeks them out.
I imagine that a person hearing the stars is someone who does not throw ridicule or shade or scepticism, saying what it is they’re hearing isn’t true.
Maybe we need to oxygenate our imagination.
Maybe imagination is what narrows the space between us and the stars.
Maybe we can pray to the ancestors to help. A prayer to the cellular nature of self.
We will pray, and we will say, we know that you know how to hear the stars.
But we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten how to hear them.
Perhaps at the end of the day, we’re praying into the deeper parts of ourselves.
Into the doubt.
The disbelief.
Into the surely this can’t be true.
Praying to those from whom the clay of our body rose.
Praying to those we have lost and who we aspire to be.
Let our prayers be to the unknown and the yet to know.
Let our prayers be in homage to the questions.
4.
Sift out the Handful of Distractions, Over Here.
I have in my hand, a rectangle of information containing the whole world. A screen of distraction from which my friends voices spring, both local and from across the waters. A playground of people, of stuff, of facts, of wonder and the inane.
A constant, pocket sized call to Over Here.
Over Here to a google search for the answer.
Over Here to a message.
Over Here to the Wikipedia, that connects up to the YouTube, that connects up to a tunnel of Over Here’s leading down to middle earth, that’s somewhere Over There but never Here.
A constant sliding door of demands for our attention. A technological seduction, a whisper to our gaze and our attention…
Over Here.
Over Here.
Over Here.
What does this do to us, I wonder.
Is the rectangle in my hand an off button for the stars?
5.
½ cup of What I’m thinking of
I’m thinking of how our daily actions affect the weather systems. How does the meeting at work, or the way we speak to our children, or whether we gather together for meals or eat alone, or what happens in the school classroom or the newspaper printing room or the local government office, how does this shape the rhythms of our planet, our ability to listen and to hear the stars?
I’m thinking of cycles of creativity and rest; of rejuvenation and nourishment. Of laughter and lightness and deleting off my phone the little bits of data that see me locked in comparison or not-enough-ness.
I’m thinking of the heartbeat of forest mice, the roar of grass responding to the rain, the breath of a wave as it breaks.
I’m thinking of a poem I read today by Brian Turner:
Sky
If the sky knew half
of what we’re doing
down here
it would be stricken,
inconsolable
and we would have
nothing but rain.
Maybe the stars are just waiting for us to pay attention.
6.
Perhaps, Dear Wonderer, I should have started at this point, and saved you the many minutes it took to get here.
I wonder, if at the end of it, the answers very simple.
I wonder, if the way to connect with nature, is to remember that you are nature.
Which then means,
the best way to learn to listen to the stars, is to first to learn to listen to yourself.
