In the dead of winter with the pandemic grinding on I took a workshop. (I’m always taking workshops. They call me the “Workshop Queen”.) Evan Premo was giving a workshop (on Zoom of course) called ”Deep Listening” based on the practices of the dancer, composer and philosopher Pauline Oliveros. One of our “assignments” was to do deep listening floating through the time/space continuum. Here are a couple of my responses on that theme from my deep listening journal. The first is a response to the confluence of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky.

I hear Jupiter whispering to Saturn, “Only once in a thousand blue moons do we get to be this close…even if it is just an illusion of the human eye.“

The second was a birthday listening:

My brother and I are wombmates. I hear each of us sloshing around in our respective amniotic sacs. I hear him kicking and flailing his arms about, bumping into me, the sound amplified through the liquid. My mother’s stomach is gurgling, digesting. I hear the double beat of my brother’s and my mother’s heartbeats and feel my own in sync. There are muffled sounds from the outside world – a voice (maybe my father’s?), loud startling noises I can’t identify. I feel safe and secure with my brother in our mother’s womb but at the same time extremely confined. I’m eager to burst out into the world though I’m terrified. He goes first. I hear a scream…then it’s my turn – the baby no one was expecting.

The next was a listening exercise just walking around my backyard:

Deep in conversation with my chickens, they decide to teach me how to sing. Quite operatic they are. They remind me a bit of Mozart’s Papageno from the Magic Flute. I never realized what an incredible range of sounds chickens have beyond “Bawk be bawk bawk”. What a choir we make, singing to the heavens!

Guess that’s it for today…Stay tuned.