reciprocal encounters with an animate world.
I've been thinking about 'conversation' and 'being relational' lately and engaging in creative work as a kind of 'call and response' and the need to listen very carefully. Conversations today with Tanya Shadrick about work and all things to do with a sense of ourselves as connected to the natural sensuous world.
David Abram calls it a reciprocal encounter, that listening and responding where both things are drawn in and changed. Starting with the simplicity of things. Me and you, me and this tree on this walk, me and this sky. Listening to those simple encounters. Making more of them. My work is all about these encounters, these conversations.
"The rain surrounded the whole cabin, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumour. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable