We tend to spend a lot of life looking and seeing with our eyes. Or, perhaps, examining the thoughts and emotions swirling inside us.
Try this: Listen. Write about what you hear, right now. It could be simple like the gurgling of the water pipes, the click-clack of the keys on the keyboard, the slow hiss of a teapot on the stove.
Or you could walk outside and see what you can find as far as sounds from the street corner or the neighborhood park; "sit with eyes closed, and listen to passing voices.... Listen less to their words [and content] and more to delivery. Remember that even a cough, a laugh, or seemingly idle humming can speak, if only we knew how to listen."[1]
Notice the visceral and vibration feeling and quality of sounds in, within, around your body.
Listen to what you don't hear.
"I'd got a little drowsy in the mind but was somehow physically wide awake sitting erect under my tree when suddenly I saw flowers, pink worlds of walls of them, salmon pink, in the Shh of silent woods (obtaining nirvana is like locating silence) and I saw an ancient vision of Dipankara Buddha who was the Buddha who never said anything, Dipankara as a vast snowy Pyramid Buddha with bushy wild black eyebrows like John L. Lewis and a terrible stare, all in an old location, an ancient snowy field like Alban ("A new field!" had yelled the Negro preacher woman), the whole vision making my hair rise. I remember the strange magic final cry that it evoked in me, whatever it means: Colyalcolor. It, the vision, was devoid of any sensation of I being myself, it was pure egolessness, just simply wild ethereal activities devoid of any wrong predicates . . . devoid of effort, devoid of mistake. "Everything's all right," I thought. "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form and we're here forever in one form or another which is empty. What the dead have accomplished, this rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land." I felt like crying out over the woods and rooftops of North Carolina announcing the glorious and simple truth." - Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums
Listen when you have a chance to "deaf" percussionist Evelyn Glennie describe how she listens with her whole being:
BONUS: In the spirit of everyday, mundane, ordinary.... here Evelyn Glennie uses ordinary objects to sound out music.
[1] Exercise inspired by Now Write! Nonfiction, by Sherry Ellis, and also my mortal muse's advice (he's a musician) to listen to the world of sounds more.
ART CREDITS: Aeolian harp at castle in Baden-Baden, Germany
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