Sound is a Force
Waves
Movement of air
We live in a sea of sound
From our hearts beating, to our breath, to the hiss of the laptop fan
The whir of the air conditioner, the rumble of a truck
The neighbor’s lawnmower, his kid shooting baskets, their beagle baying in the yard
The whine of tires on the interstate, truck brakes, train whistles
Music
Rhythm, melody, harmony
Music instantly harmonizes the brain for the player
Eyes close, ears open, fingers dance
Time suspends
And we remember
That the very smallest things
That are the building blocks of
Everything
Are vibrating strings
Have you ever listened to the night? I mean really listened. With your eyes closed and your breath nearly suspended, reaching out with some subtle sense that lives in your ears but isn’t your ears, to the farthest away thing you can possibly hear? Try it right now, even if it isn’t night. Even if you have to get up and walk away from where you are. Even if the people around you think you’ve gone coocoo bananas. It’ll be worth it.
I’ll wait.
Hey, welcome back. So how’d it go? What did you hear? How do you feel?
Hopefully you have a sense of deep calm and well-being. You usually do after stretching your energy body like that – because that’s what you just did. You reached out with your energy body, as far away as you could hear, which might be miles. Sound waves keep moving if they don’t run into anything to break them up or stop them. They’re pretty darn faint by the time they cross a great distance, so they’re easy to ignore.
But it’s healthy to listen in that intensely deep and focused way, and it’s good to be aware of our surroundings like that. There is a reason that ears evolved the way they did. Our ancestors needed to hear predators or other trouble well before it was upon them, and those with the best hearing got out of the way most often, and in theory, survived to make the most babies. Our hearing is an enormous, stupendously handy, amazing gift from Gaia that we don’t even think about enough to take it for granted.
We listen to close up stuff. Much of the time, people are listening to stuff in their earbuds, which are literally inside the body. Headphones are nearly as bad, and a lot of us live in those, especially in these days of working and learning from home. Those things cause ear fatigue, which leads to actual physical fatigue. When our ears aren’t happy, we’re not healthy.
I was having some weirdness with my eyes a while back, well, different than the usual weirdness, and I asked my eye doctor about it. I was noticing that when I was doing close-up work, after a while my eye muscles would just freak out, go into a spasm of some kind, and I wouldn’t be able to see anything for a couple seconds. I wondered if I needed a different prescription in my glasses or something. The doctor said no, it was just eye strain, and what I needed to do was, religiously, every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, something naturey or at least natural preferred, like the trees outside or a houseplant. That would relax my focusing muscles for a few seconds and then I could get back to work and not have the problem.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that we need to do the same thing with our ears when we’re stuck under headphones all day. Feel into the tapestry of sound at the outer limit of your auditory range and get a sense of where you are on the planet, and in space. This is our environment, we need to learn to read it with our ears. We can’t be afraid if we can cast our ears over our domain and hear nothing to frighten us. I can read the mood of the interstate by listening for a few seconds before I get in the car to drive somewhere. That allows me to prepare to be extra vigilant if I need to, before I get on and discover that things are chaos.
But it doesn’t have to be far away to be deep.
A mother can hear her baby sleeping and know when everything is okay and when something isn’t okay, if she pays attention. We can differentiate the messages in our babies’ cries, from fright to hunger to I don’t feel good to pain to frustration to change me now. We can tell.
We can hear the weather by the noises the house makes. Or listen to the sounds of the neighborhood and get a sense of where there’s trouble. Or listen deeply to a loved one talking and hear the stress, sadness, or physical pain in their voice, even if they never once mention it. Listening deeply with your children, listening with the respect and reverence they deserve, is essential to raising healthy, happy humans. Well, humans, healthy and happy or not.
Sir Terry Pratchett wrote about an idea that he called spill words, in his book, I Shall Wear Midnight. Mrs. Proust, the city witch, explains to Tiffany Aching, “A spill word is a word that somebody almost says but doesn’t. For a moment they hover in the conversation but aren’t spoken . . .” The Discworld witches can hear the spill words, but so can you, if you listen deeply. It’s uncanny when you practice true, intentional, concentrated listening how suddenly the things people want to say but don’t become so nearly audible that you can hear them–with that same faculty that allows you to cast your soul out to the interstate two miles away and hear its mood.
Our ears are attached directly to the vagus nerve on both sides of each eardrum. Sound waves hit the eardrum and the information goes directly to the vagus nerve, without taking precious milliseconds to visit the brain for processing first. That’s how we wake up in the night because we heard something that didn’t belong – our brains didn’t process it, the vagus nerve took the information and instantly transmitted a message to the adrenal glands to release a little juice to wake us up now. We don’t go through the slow stages of waking up on our own, letting the brainwaves and brain chemistry gradually shift over from rest and digest to time to get up. We are instantly awake and aware, and deeply listening already. We have a vague memory that we heard something, but maybe we don’t know quite what it was, which is how we know that the sound wasn’t processed by the brain before the signal went out to wake up.
Our ears are amazing, and our sense of hearing holds more gifts than most people will ever suspect. Now that the weather is getting nice here in the States, I hope you’ll step outside and really listen, especially now that there’s less traffic noise than ever. See what the world really sounds like. Enjoy the symphony of the birds and the bugs and the other critters as they chatter about their day and check in for the night. It’s amazing. I might even go so far as to call it awesome. Just listen.
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