Humans Willing to Listen
“The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it.”
When the headlines come crashing down like splintered beams, and the world is filtered through the haze of human destruction, it helps to turn off the lights and stand outside. Beyond the cacophony of our machines and our ways, there is another soundtrack.
At my friend's house in a rural area of Los Angeles, owls and coyotes sing us to sleep. Here at home, on the coast, there are the waves, of course; there's that bird on the railing, and the ones I can't see, peep-peep-peeping as they skim the water below the cliff. And, last week, I was startled awake at two-something a.m. by the sharp, screechy bark of a fox. As I lay there in the dark, hoping to hear it again, I thought about how deeply comforting it is to hear non-human sounds. I thought about how diminished we are by the absence of those human and beyond-human sounds that are missing.
The baby swallows in the mud nest above the front door are all wide mouths and hungry squawking. It's the second crop of babies this year, a small but extravagant flourishing that seems to say, You see? There are miracles, even now. Their presence is reassuring, especially after the babies that died two years ago. One fell out of the nest and, a few days later, the other three went silent. Since swallows return to the same nest each spring, we decided to take that one down in case the swallows had perished of something toxic or contagious. We found the mother's lifeless body draped over the babies, with her wings outstretched.
In the 1980's, the late Fran Peavey wrote a book called Heart Politics. Concerned about the threat of nuclear war, she sold her house, paid her debts and set out to travel the world in order to listen to ordinary people speak about what mattered - to them, starting in Japan. In Kyoto, she sat on a park bench with a cloth sign spread out at her feet. It read, AMERICAN WILLING TO LISTEN. Eventually, people began to come sit down next to her and talk. When the person didn't speak English and there was no one to translate, she listened with her heart, focusing her attention past their sentences until she could hear the emotional tone of what they were saying. In this way, she listened to people in India, Scotland, England, Thailand, Germany, Israel, Palestine, and Sweden. I would listen to the person as open-heartedly as I could, trying to get a glimpse of the world through his or her eyes. Usually when the conversation lasted long enough, I would start to feel the soft stirrings of a connection - some uncovering of our common root system.
As I re-read Fran Peavey's book, I felt deeply comforted. The depth of her good will is palpable, even now, decades after her death. Love has momentum that outlasts the momentum of trauma. Basking for a moment in this unexpected respite, I thought of my friend, Ali, a Palestinian peacemaker in the West Bank. His strong conviction is that polarized communities cannot afford to turn away from each other, but must engage directly, personally, nonviolently. He lives and works on a small piece of land that's been in his family for generations, surrounded now by Jewish settlements. At the compound, he and his family host groups of Palestinians and settlers every day: they come there to listen to each other. Sometimes they gather privately, sometimes in mixed groups. They take a lot of flak from people on all sides.
Once, when visiting Ali, we were invited to the home of a Palestinian family for dinner. It was late Friday afternoon, rush hour, Ramadan and also Shabbat. We got through the Israeli army check point and made our way down a steep hill on a narrow, curving road. Tempers were frayed because people were hungry, thirsty and eager to get home. Then we saw that the army had set up impromptu roadblocks on the steepest curves, just to harass people. Ali pulled over and got out of the car. It was a volatile situation: we could hardly believe that he had decided to approach the soldiers directly at that moment, in the middle of a crowded road with no escape. My friend and I slid down in our seats and kept quiet. Ali approached the Israeli soldiers slowly, with his hands raised and open, and gently asked to speak to the commanding officer. A small knot of soldiers clustered around him, hands on their weapons. Ali stood talking with them for about 15 minutes; then he returned to the car and we continued on our way. He said he told them this: What you are doing here hurts me, as a human being. It hurts the people you are stopping. They are human beings, hot and tired, hungry and thirsty, trying to get home. You know this, and yet you deliberately choose this moment and this place to harass them. Why do you want to create ill will by provoking us? What does this accomplish, except to create more hatred? You are hurting yourselves as well because you must compromise your own humanity to do this.
He was so gentle and calm, so deeply kind. The soldiers listened intently, especially the younger ones. They had never met a Palestinian peacemaker. By the end of the conversation, they had invited him to address a group of officers at their next training course in Galilee. A few weeks later, he did. It is Ali's strong conviction that we must not allow disagreement to distance us: instead, we must engage with those we disagree with, to move toward them instead of away. We must do this peacefully and respectfully, from our deepest humanity.
In her book, Fran Peavey writes, I carry with me the pain of some of my partners in the world, but it does not weigh me down. Much of my life and environment have been designed to isolate me from this pain, but I have come to see it as a kind of holy nectar. The more I drink, the more I can taste what is happening on this planet.
And that's it, isn't it? To taste what is happening on this planet - to taste it with our hearts.
I wonder whether we might find ways to do the same - with each other, and with the Natural World. Are we willing to drink the holy nectar of hope and loss? Are we willing to listen to our beyond-human kin? From the land of the ancestors, Fran Peavey invites us to raise a glass and wish each other well, and all our furred, feathered, scaled and slithering kin until, in Fran Peavey's words, we feel the stirrings of connection that comfort and protect us like a mother's outstretched wings.
