Deep Listening

I’m listening to the sounds of Paula, Ashley’s mom, moving about in the kitchen, opening cupboards, pouring coffee, setting the dog bowls on the floor. This morning we slept in till seven and while this is a real achievement after yesterday’s 5 AM wakeup, I can’t help feeling that I’ve lost some time, the darkness and peace that I need in the mornings. Now instead of feeling like I’m the only person alive, drifting in the timeless space before the day begins, I feel like I’m hiding in our bedroom. I want to get up to refill my cup of coffee, but I’m not ready to talk to anybody. I’m not ready to see anybody. I need to keep hiding just a little longer.

I absolutely love the book that I’m reading this morning, a novel by Rachel Joyce called The Music Shop. I’ve had so much luck lately choosing books solely by mood and intuition instead of enacting some vague plan: “I should read a classic” or “I should read one of the paperbacks I just bought at Half Price Books.” Have I mentioned that we went to a bookstore for the first time in six months? I’ll have to tell you about that later.

What I love about The Music Shop is the way the characters talk about music, about listening deeply. I’m talking particularly about Frank, the main character. He’s a the owner of an eclectic record shop in late-eighties England, a vinyl-only guy, one of the last hold-outs in a world that is being completely consumed by CDs, that shiny new digital format, clean, pristine, and perfect. Frank’s special talent is listening to his customers and diagnosing the precise music they need in their lives right now, whether they know it or not. For example, in the opening chapter, a sad pale man with a broken heart comes in asking about Chopin. “I only like Chopin,” he says. But Frank listens to him, looks him up and down, and puts him into a listening booth with a track by Aretha Franklin, “Oh No Not My Baby.” “No, this is what you need,” he says. And Frank is right, one hundred percent right. The music opens up the man’s heart and lets him feel some of what he’s been keeping bottled up. He finds self-expression by listening deeply to Aretha Franklin’s plaintive, passionate, soul-rousing song.

I’ve been wanting to listen to music like this myself. I mean, setting aside the time, shutting down all distractions, and just listening. Frank talks about this in the book. Everybody knows “Moonlight Sonata,” but no one ever listens to it. Not really. Music isn’t meant for the background. At one point, Frank tells Ilse, the woman he loves, that she has to lie down when she listens to the record he gives her. Lie down flat and put on a pair of headphones. Don’t do anything else. There comes a point where you can see the music. You can see the stories it has to tell you. Listening in this way can change your life. 

When was the last time you really listened to music—without holding your phone or fixing a sandwich or driving to the grocery store? 

We are six months into the pandemic, into this huge disruption of our lives. But there is still time to develop new routines like this, like lying flat and listening deeply. Routine isn’t even the right word, is it? Deep listening is so powerful that it can become a ritual, an essential practice, a prayer. 

Patience

This week I’m working with the idea of patience. This is a big one for me. I’m so used to forcing something to happen. I always believe that I have to set up a regular time and place to write, or I’ll never accomplish anything with this dream, I’ll never go far enough, I’ll never finish the novels and stories I’m supposed to write.

Somehow I’d like to learn to take the ego out of the equation. I want to believe that the story already exists somewhere out there. I’m getting glimpses of a landscape that is somewhere else, just out of reach. I can transcribe little bits of what I see, but I have to make quick, targeted strikes into the territory of the imagination.

Behind all of this lies fear. Fear that what I see will recede and wash away when I get closer, like a mirage on the highway, dissolving away into a haze.

This morning, I’ve come out to the living room sofa again. I’m the only one in the house who’s awake. I brewed a pot of coffee, and without turning on any lights, I sat down, slipped in my earbuds, and put on a playlist of quiet, ambient music. My intention was to lull myself into the intuitive state, which I imagine to be a place of listening and receiving, a meditational space that is far removed from the usual pushing and straining I put myself through when I try to write.

This is the worry I have this morning. I’m sitting here, quietly listening to music and sipping my first cup of coffee, and I feel cut off from the characters I’ve started to write about. I’m hoping for a clear sign, some sort of directional indication, leading me to the next scene or passage I can witness and transcribe. But if nothing clear is coming through, am I experiencing some kind of drought? Do I stick with this today, knowing my characters are still somewhere out of reach and out of sight? Or do I take this as a sign that I need to be patient, that my subconscious will serve up another image or scene to work with when it’s ready?

I think there is a value to coming out here to the sofa and sitting in the dark. Listening to music and sipping coffee by myself is like opening a door or a window. Wasn’t it Neil Gaiman who said that many of his best ideas come to him when he’s bored and alone, or simply staring out the window at nothing in particular, a hedge or a wall or an overcast sky?

Opening up my laptop and typing a few lines about what I’m experiencing right now is also a way of honoring who I am this morning, and what I’m thinking and feeling. I believe that I have to strike some sort of balance. I think for me, it’s essential that I do my best to maintain a habit of coming to the page regularly, so that the door is open for these characters to come closer, to step out of the haze and reveal more of themselves to me.

Focus on their emotions, not on your own role as designer or architect of their story. You need new metaphors, new analogies to describe your own role in the process of telling a story.

If I work on patience, on creating the space for the next fragments of my story to ripen, then I am also cultivating a sense of trust in myself as an artist; I am honoring my own process as an intuitive writer.

Yes, I have a tendency to give in to anxiety and to fall back on negative self-talk when I feel like I’m not producing enough work. Or when I worry that I’m not showing up to the page often enough. I’m learning to work in a completely different way, and this will take time. The story that I’m writing is my own. I am the work in progress.

Writing in Cars

I have a secret writing place. For the second time in two weeks, I leave my office on my lunch break and drive to the outskirts of the huge parking lot behind the campus where I work.

What is it about this place? The spot I like faces away from the activity of students coming and going. I look out my windshield and instead of seeing familiar faces or cars driving around and around, I see a small patch of grass with yellow wildflowers and a clump of trees with leaves and branches blowing in the breeze. Last week it rained while I wrote in my car, then cleared up again by the time I finished.

I wish I could make it rain every time I write in my car.

I put on my earbuds and find a Spotify playlist that I like: Deep Focus. The ambient music taps the sediment loose, wakes me up. Thoughts and images bubble up. My eyes rest on the trees. The leaves rock slowly, hypnotically. I face away from the campus and its courtyards and breezeways. For a brief time, I forget that I’m at work. I’m alone and I can think my own thoughts.

I eat my lunch and let my mind turn towards a story idea, calmly, without forcing anything. Then it’s time to capture some of these images. I set aside my lunch bag and either grab my laptop or pull out the pale green notebook I picked up at the Japanese bookstore a few weeks ago. I set a timer and head off on a journey.

Eventually, I come back. I move my car back to the main parking lot, closer to my office. I throw away my trash, and head back upstairs, ready to get back to work on the project I set aside an hour before.

What’s unusual, I suppose, is that I have my own office space with a door that I can close and lock, and yet today I had to get up and walk away from the projects and emails I had been dealing with all morning. I know that I’m lucky to have a space of my own. I have written–or tried to write–in this office at least three times a week for the past couple years. But sometimes I can’t shut off the work thoughts. Or a colleague who doesn’t know I’m a lunch time writer knocks on the door. Sometimes the group study session in the room next door gets a little too crazy.

Even though I’ve trained myself to write in all sorts of conditions, I have to keep coming up with new ways to leave the ordinary world behind so that I can fall into the timeless world of my stories.

This is how it should be. Find a way to make the separation between your work life and your writing life. Change your location, stare at the trees, watch the rain.