When I woke up about 15 minutes ago, a complete awakening in spite of the outside darkness, it was the very time we would have been getting up if all had gone as planned. This was to be an early rise & shine, followed by a back roads ramble out to Devon, breakfast at our beloved Nudy's (doing our best to snag a table with a view of trains whizzing up & down the Main Line tracks), then further westward to help a friend organize her extensive book collection.
With a bit of a starting nudge last week from me followed by a rainy Saturday, the friend sorted through them on her own, so no need for our early morning westward ho!, but here I am, awake & up instead of snugged next to John, sound asleep.
A trigger of yesterday's blues was my disappointment at not heading back this morning. I'd been looking forward to getting better acquainted, to perhaps bumping the relationship further up the friendship scale.
If books are any indication of a person's mind & character & spirit,
she is a human worth getting to know.
Listening as a principle - let alone as primary or core P - never rose to the level of my awareness. Until last night, finally in bed after a late, glorious supper & John's introduction to the sweet pleasures of All Creatures Great & Small. Tucked in by John, who headed back down in his studio, with his reading light angled to shine over to my side, I was settled in for a good read - Mark Nepo's Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, a book plucked last week from the stacks awaiting shorting.
Mark Nepo is a remarkable writer. His books have moved & changed me, so reading his latest was already on my radar, although I hadn't given any thought to the topic. It came home with me because of the author, not the subject.
Yesterday's blues were also tied to my gnawing dismay at what feels like mega deficits in easy, engaging conversation/communication skills. Great at the "Hail, fellow, well met!" openings, spurred by a deep interest in people & desire to get to know them. But abysmal at striking a genuine connection, at developing it. On several occasions, I'd be in the living room while Mom & John in the kitchen, deep in an interesting discussion - which stopped as soon as I came into view. Still remember my awe listening to Peter & Mim & Whitney having a glorious conversation over a wide range of topics while waited in a Holy Redeemer family lounge for Mom to come out of surgery - how did they do it? For eons, the art of engaging conversation has been high on my wish list - ungranted.
Then, last night, nestled under the covers, Chessie curled up next to me, was hit with a great AH HA! I never connected with the #1 ingredient to a good conversation - being a good listener.
And that is not me.
Well, it was, but it was trained out of me.
Decisively.
My great AH HA! arrived on page 5. Closed the book, turned out the light, and pondered.
"How do we listen to & stay in conversation with all that is beyond our awareness?" That sentence spoke to me, but what drew me to turn off the light & contemplate went deeper - "The way we think and feel and sense our way into all we don't know is the art of intuition. It is an art of discovery. To intuit means to look upon, to instruct from within, to understand or learn by instinct. And instinct refers to a learning we are born with."
A learning we are born with. Am smiling, remembering my most incredible experience at Omega, where I connected with my just-home-from-the-hospital newborn self. That itty bitty baby totally intuited everything happening around her, instinctively knew what was expected of her.
Amazing, having that experience connect with this new reawakening to a forever knowledge - intuition is a deep form of listening that when trusted can return us to the common, irrepressible element at the center of all life and to the Oneness of things that surrounds us, both of which are at the heart of resilience."
Small wonder I turned off the light & lay in the dark, pondering. All of that actually happening depends on one thing above all others - trusting intuition.
No trust of intuition, no deep form of listening, no return to the core element at the center of all life & sense of Oneness.
Trust is essential.
As strong as that trust was in the itty bitty baby, it's been essentially stomped out of the 62-year old just awakening to a great task. Stomped out every time I asked a question with a difficult answer & got a nicer, easier-to-bear lie as a response.
More spooky wonderful - just yesterday morning, was rereading Nancy Slonim Aronie's take on this phenomenon. In Writing from the Heart, she describes how our Reality Interpreters' (aka adults) intentional misrepresentation of perception messes up a child's innate ability to see what is what. "How many of these ('for a good reason') lies do little kids have to hear before they stop trusting their inner voices."
How do I restore faith in my own beaten down & battered intuition?
By continuing down the twisty turney freaky
wonderful path before me,
that started with a
long-ago student I haven't talked to in decades,
who thought I might help
solve her library-arranging challenge,
who had a book by a revered author
on an interesting topic & generously lent it to me,
which got me reading about listening
just as I was engulfed by depression
over my stunningly acute shortage of conversation skills
& over-abundance of misconstructed thoughts to words,
which lead me to the AH HA! realization that
listening is the key component of good conversation
but am gosh awful at it,
that intuition - when trusted - is a form of deep listening,
but alas trust in my intuition was pretty much
rooted out of me by self-protecting,
hopefully well-meaning
Reality Interpreters.Whoosh!
Now my task is to get back to square one, to that itty bitty baby who realized as soon as she caught sight of her family in residence that these were not people comfortable with clarity & open sharing, so uniformly broken that wholeness was experienced as the aberration.
Thanks to Omega, to Bethany, to Mark, to all who came before ~ and ~ to the beyond-belief fact that I am taking a workshop in less than two weeks from Nancy Slonim Aronie (!!!), am moving briskly toward it!
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