Learning How To Listen

When I was training to be a Samaritans volunteer I remember we were taught the three golden rules:

1. Listen

2. Listen.

3. Really listen.

Really listening includes listening not only to what is being said, but also to what is not being said. Really listening means silencing your own thoughts so that you can concentrate totally on the person who is speaking – listening to that whole person, not just their words, because the words are just an outward expression of what lies within.

The same is true for music. According to my CD collection, music is a series of millions of samples of loudness and wavelength, and to my ear music is a pattern of compressions in the air, but that is not what we call music. Nor, I suggest, is music just a tune that you can hum or tap your foot to, or some sound that’s on in the background. I recently watched a YouTube video about really listening to music, listening to each instrument, each voice, how they were used and mixed. Only then can you begin to hear the music behind the music, the soul of the music, shouting or declaiming, loving or crying, making you feel.

If this is how to listen to music then how should we listen to the music of life? Just like music, life could be described as just a series of notes, a CV, a photograph album: this is me as a baby, this is me getting married, and this is me with my grandchildren. But is that all there is? Perhaps we should listen harder.

We could start by listening to all the different voices in our lives, the people who mattered – parents, teachers, our best friends – and hear the songs of life they taught us. We could listen to all our struggles and triumphs and what patterns we can detect, what music ran through them. We can listen to the music of love and beauty that warmed and inspired us, that music that still plays quietly in our hearts if we stop and listen hard enough. We can then listen to how our song has developed and changed through our lives, and how wonderful it has become. Finally we may get some idea of how our song has joined with the song of the whole earth and all that is.

“Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing,
Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing.
Who could live without it? I ask in all honesty
What would we be? Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me.”

Abba

All Is Full Of Love

Isn't it annoying when you've got a tune going round in your head and you can't remember what it is? It happened last night as I was listening to the internet radio station Chill FM. Slipped in between two tracks of angelic ethereal beauty, one short piece that I know well, and almost certainly have on CD. Is it Nitin Sawhney? I picked my way through Prophesy one track at a time; not there. Moby? So I stepped through Play as if crossing a stream on stepping stones. What a lovely stream, how it flows! But the mystery music did not swim by. Transglobal Underground? I followed that cavern down to the end but failed to hit gold. Was it on the World Chill compilation? World Chill on Chill FM? How cool would that be? But no, the trail was getting colder.

In the end, I found a lot of things that I was not looking for. I found the Lost City Of Atlantis, the Lost Chord, I discovered the source of the Nile and the proof of The Trisection Of The Angle, I unearthed a sledge called Rosebud, found Lord Lucan and Shergar but that track got lost in the undergrowth.

I had listened to some fine music along the way though.

So instead I looked up the third of the trio of tracks I had heard. It was a remix of Bjork's All Is Full Of Love.

“All Is Full Of Love...

Maybe not from the sources

You have poured yours

Maybe not from the directions

You are staring at”

That's when I realised my failed search had been successful, because without it I would never have listened to all that great music. My CDs were All Full Of Music which I had not been looking for.

Last Friday I was walking on the edge of Salisbury Plain near the Westbury White Horse. It was a clear sunny Good Friday and a fair number of people had come up the hill – walkers like me, motorists and their families, army jeeps, a trail motorbike, hang gliders, model plane fliers. Everyone appeared to be enjoying themselves. The wind blew steadily up the North side, keeping the hang gliders and model planes aloft; children ran around up and down the grassy slopes shouting and playing. I had got out of the house, stretched my limbs and breathed the fresh Spring air.

Before I reached the White Horse I stopped walking. I was no longer a hiker, but a listener. First I heard the silence, a stillness stretched over twenty miles of secluded fields and trees, virtually uninhabited bar the odd army quarters. As I stood still, the quiet slowly receded and the sound of the breeze softly stirring the grasses sang in my ears. Suddenly a bird started up behind me, and then the music of the skylark fluttered down from the sky with a sound like water rippling over pebbles. That skylark - and for all I know, farther and farther, all the birds of Somerset and Wiltshire, for it seemed as if all time and distance existed in that moment.

I'm sure everyone up at the White Horse got what they wanted on the hillside that day. I had my walk and a pint of Cornish beer at the end. And if that was all I was looking for it was all I would have got. But like someone crossing the road I stopped, looked and listened. All is full of love, and we pass by without noticing.