Exercises in Being Here, Day 4: listening

 It is hard to take your eyes off the view, especially in the morning when the clouds form a blanket over the valley but also in the afternoon, when the sun moves through the clouds and beams of light reach all the way down to the river. In the evening the clouds are often still there but at night it is clear and there are many stars. I like to sit on the little wall in front of the kitchen, on the old part where the stones have been stacked meticulously, decades—maybe centuries—ago, where small plants grow on top and little ferns at the bottom. What happens when you listen to instead of look at the landscape? It sounds easy and in a way it is, but how do you really listen? The best way to figure that out is to do it and see what happens. 

I sit down and close my eyes. It is so silent here, which means that every sound breaks the silence and asks for attention. The wind is there most of the time, until it lies down and you forget about it until it comes back. A dog barks, another dog starts barking, somebody is hammering, a power tool, silence again, which of course is never really silence. There is the blood running through your veins and you hear it when your ears turn inwards. When a car approaches it is almost impossible not to open my eyes, because the sound of cars is rare here. Church bells, the same tune always, I already hear the notes in my memory before they sound. Faraway voices, another dog. Every time I hear something my brain names it, how do you listen without your brain processing what it hears? I try a few times during the day, but to actively “just” hear the sounds without thinking what makes the sound is hard. It is not so when listening to music, or at least most of the time it isn’t, at least when it is instrumental music.

In the evening the soundscape is different. There are no cars, no human voices, there are owls and they are loud. Every time I hear one I think “owl” and when they make an owl sound I am not familiar with, I think “what kind of owl?” There is something making a high pitched sound and for a while I just hear it without thinking, coming from different corners but then again:”Is it a mouse, mice, another rodent?”

Maybe it will be different when I am here longer and the sounds aren’t as new as they are now, probably I have to do some listening for a longer stretch of time. I want to read Pauline Oliveros who created the Deep Listening practice and Raymond Murray Schafer who coined the term soundscape and John Cage who taught that music is everywhere in the ordinary moments of life, but not today. Today I just listen.