Taking a pause to listen—especially to our Mother, the Earth—will always be an energizing and revealing practice. It is important to recognize that listening changes depending on where we are listening from. This is an invitation: to listen from different inner states as well as in different external spaces. The idea is to break the paradigms of our everyday listening, that is, listening from within our comfort zone, and to be able to move through and illuminate our blind spots. One of the purposes of Indigenous ceremonies has always been to make this possible: to see beyond our normal limited views to access heightened observation and listening. Tobacco and other medicinal plants can also help us reach that level of presence, observation, and attunement.
But there is another veil that can prevent our full listening. It is said, “We do not live in the world, we live in the story we tell ourselves about the world.” In other words, we could have the voice of Mother Earth right in our ear—even shouting to us—and no matter how still we are, we might not hear it because it doesn’t fit with the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Let me give you a personal example. For many years I worked with the Immersion Program of the Lutheran Church in Mexico. Groups came from the U.S. and Canada to meet and listen to community leaders, to get to know communities in struggle, and to understand the effects of their countries’ global policies. These visits were a kind of disruption to their worldview, breaking paradigms so they could listen in a different way and then dialogue with the new reality they were observing. Through disruption they were able to listen from another place—and suddenly, they could hear what had always been there. I say “always been there” because the same reality of marginalized communities, of communities in struggle, who lived just 30 minutes from their homes in the U.S. - but there they couldn’t listen. Their defense mechanisms immediately kicked in, and they neither saw nor heard the realities of these communities.
We do not listen to everything that surrounds us; often it requires provocation and disruption. So the question is: how can we break those defense mechanisms in order to listen more deeply? What if we went to a marginalized community—what we often call “poor”—and simply sat there to listen to the Earth? What if we listened to the Earth with or through a person or group with whom we disagree? I am not saying it is wrong to go into that place in nature that calls you to pause and reflect; it is not a matter of one form of listening or the other. The invitation is to create space to listen from diverse points within both the social and natural field.