“You can listen to silence Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it.”
—Chaim Potok from The Chosen.
Photo by Miez! (distributed with instagram)
The Vulnerability of Listening
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“Listening entails vulnerability. Listening requires a willingness, even a longing, to understand another.”
A few weeks ago, our very own Krista Tippett stopped by the offices of Huffington Post in New York City to tape this short feature. The result: “Two Minutes of Wisdom with Krista Tippett.”
It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself…
Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, ‘Listen to me.’ This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life.
(Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has said that she feels more comfortable observing other people than being a participant on the stage of life. But in this week’s New Yorker, Lahiri opens up and tells the story of how she became a writer. Hers is a story of stealth audacity and of finding a home for herself in solitude the of her desk.
~Nancy Rosenbaum, producer
Civil Singing...
by Krista Tippett, host
This week’s show with Anthony Appiah is many things at once: thought-provoking, funny, intellectual, and a kind of a relief. He has enormous wisdom about human resistance to change and how it then really happens. But he also makes the point that reaching across contemporary divides of difference need not be the great moral struggle we tend to make it. It can be about mundane points of human connection; these count.
While we were in production with this show, I heard surprising echoes of his point in a wonderfully pleasant and also moving piece on the BBC about how modern Germans are flocking to choirs. There are choirs for people who can sing and who can’t; they’re bringing people together who would rarely be friends or even acquaintances otherwise. There are even German-Turkish choirs that get Germans learning Turkish words in a way that school and culture would not — and that do so with joy.
You can listen here, and scroll down the page to “Chapter Four.” Enjoy!
About the image: The Rundfunkchor Choir from Berlin. (photo: Matthias Heyde)
Repossessing Virtue: Chery Cutler on the Art and Practice of Improvisation
» download (mp3, 16:11)
Nancy Rosenbaum, Associate Producer
I love to dance. After spending my work week plugged into screens, headphones, and all things Microsoft Outlook, I seek spirit and solace in movement. Most Saturdays you’ll find me sweating it out at an African dance class in downtown Minneapolis.
In April I traveled to the Pacific Northwest to participate in a weekend-long improvisational dance workshop on Vashon Island, near Seattle. To call it a dance workshop is actually something of a misnomer. I and my fellow improvisers weren’t there to perfect our dance technique. Our charge was to learn to listen without fear — or put differently, to practice the art of “creative listening” which is to pay attention to whatever is happening in the present moment of an unscripted dance. I think that Jon Kabat-Zinn would give it a thumb’s up.
I was so jazzed by the experience of the workshop that a few days after I got back I decided to interview one of the facilitators, dance veteran Chery Cutler. In a book she co-authored, Creative Listening: Overcoming Fear in Life & Work, Chery describes creative listening as “learning to quiet fear and listen three-dimensionally — to one’s own inner voice, to others, and to the environment…”
Slight in stature but super-sized in spirit, Chery is now retired from Wesleyan University where she founded the dance department and worked as a professor for over three decades. She recently told me that past SOF guest Majora Carter took her class back in the day.
So much of what Chery says about improvisation and creative listening echoes the conversations we’ve been having as part of our Repossessing Virtue project. She calls this moment of economic collapse “an extremely exciting time” that has the potential to unleash creativity if we can just stop, listen, and resist the urge to willfully dance to the beat of our pesky fear-driven agendas.
We recently wrapped production on Living Differently, Beyond Economic Crisis — the latest installment in our Repossessing Virtue series. This program features the reflections of eight SOF listeners and scores of others online. Soon we’ll be posting more audio interviews to fatten the growing RV archive. I think this conversation with Chery makes for a nice addition to this growing chorus of voices. Let me know what you think.
[I’ve included a picture of my fellow creative listening improvisers here. As the lone Minnesota representative, I’m the only one wearing a coat — not quite fully trusting that it’s safe to venture outside without a down-filled garment. Chery is the one crouched in front, smiling broadly and wearing a black hoodie.]
