Where The Music Lives

learning to listen creatively

Listen, my friend: what can you hear? Spring is creeping in on cat feet, subtle as the warming of the earth, welcome as a breeze sighing through the oak leaves that have yet to surrender to gravity. Children’s voices ring out in play on the weekends and after school whenever the sun invites them outside. I swear I can almost hear the collective breathing of the trees, the grass, the flowers. It is these sounds that I wish to focus on, but a distant, nagging hiss threatens to drown it all out. Our country is at war with itself, lines drawn in red and blue and every child of us required to choose a side or be caught in the crossfire. My belief in the innate goodness of humans is bleeding out from a dozen stabs in the back while I sob for the loss of innocence that is not only mine. Collectively we are suffering alone. Only art can return to us what has been lost, for “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.”¹ As Earth’s creative energy gathers beneath her skirts, I plunge my hands into Cerridwen’s cauldron. Despair is not permitted in the spring; our work is just beginning.

While I have longed for something to do, some way to fix it, the word on the wind is: LISTEN. Spoken, ironically, in the voice of an older white man. Rick Rubin, nine-time GRAMMY winning record producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way Of Being, has a voice like distant thunder, the kind of sound that catches and holds attention. His subject isn’t social reform but creativity as a way of life, but doing either—or anything—well begins with listening deeply. As he puts it, “When listening there is only now.”²

While the eyes and mouth can be sealed, the ear has no lid. Nothing to close. It takes in what surrounds it. It receives, but it can’t transmit. The ear is simply present to the world. When we hear, sounds enter the ear autonomously, often we’re not aware of the individual sounds and their full range. Listening is paying attention to those sounds, being present with them, being in communion with them. To say that we listen with the ears or the mind might be a misconception. We listen with the whole body, our whole self. The vibrations filling the space around us, the act of sound waves hitting the body, the spacial perceptions they indicate, the internal physical reactions they stimulate: this is all part of listening…

I am reminded of bats. I am reminded of how elephants listen with their feet, tracking the passage of their kind from miles away. I am reminded of our trip to the zoo last weekend, of how I watched the elephants in their too-small enclosure and wondered at their proximity to the freeway we drove in on and the kinds of vibrations they must pick up, an experience of life so different from mine. Do they feel, deep down, that this cramped and frenzied world is not the one they were made for? Do they find themselves numbing to the flow of information, “spacing out” as we say? Or, do they let the information flow through them, taking it as it comes and letting it be what it is? This type of listening is essential to a creative lifestyle, Rubin maintains, and is well worth practicing.

When you practice listening with your whole self you expand the scope of your consciousness to include vast amounts of information otherwise missed…If it’s music you’re listening to, consider closing your eyes. You may find yourself getting lost in the experience. When the piece ends you might be surprised where you find yourself. You’d been transported to another place, the place where the music lives.

This idea of being transported to another place by art is not a new one, I have escaped to the place where stories live as often as I can for nearly my entire life. Music, on the other hand, rarely transports me anywhere at all, which might be the reason that I don’t tend to consciously associate listening deeply with the act of focusing and deliberately engaging the imagination, not in the same way that I do reading. In my experience, accessing the creative plane is largely a solo mission. I might read a book out loud to my kids, but either my imagination is engaged or I am paying attention to how they are receiving the art, I can’t do both at once. I might listen to music with other people, but either I am transported by the music itself or by my feelings of connection to the people who are experiencing it with me, not both at once. I might collaborate creatively on a project, but if I do the art is no longer mine. The question that immediately arose when reading that section, however, was one I had never before considered: What if conversation could be approached as a collaborative creative act?

To do so, according to Rubin, would require a great deal of patience.

Communication moves in two directions, even when one person speaks and the other listens silently. When the listener is totally present, the speaker often communicates differently. Most people aren’t used to being fully heard, and it can be jarring for them. Sometimes we block the flow of information offered and compromise true listening. Our critical mind may kick in, taking note of what we agree with and what we don’t, what we like and what we dislike. We may look for reasons to distrust the speaker or make them wrong. Formulating an opinion is not listening. Neither is preparing a response, or defending our position, or attacking another’s. To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all.

The majority of my listening is done impatiently, I’m afraid. Too often I get caught up in what I think is expected of me, and responding accordingly, to listen deeply to what is actually being said. Too often I am focused mainly on saying something witty, intelligent, caring, or cunning; in short, I am more focused on my need to be heard than I am on their need to be heard by me.

When listening, we tend to skip forward and generalize the speaker’s overall message. We miss the subtleties of the point if not the entire premise. In addition to the assumption that we’re saving time, this shortcut also avoids the discomfort of challenging our prevailing stories, and our worldview continues to shrink…

It is no excuse to say it is a common problem, in fact, that makes it worse. I believe I could say that the failure to actively listen is so widespread that it is the problem at the root of all others in our society, it is how we got into this mess in the first place. And, for all my desire to fix us, I am actively participating in the problem on a daily basis.

Why? Why do we struggle to listen? Listening, as the apparently more passive act, should be easier than talking, right?

Wrong. It’s actually one of the hardest daily practices of all, because it demands something from us that is universally uncomfortable: listening requires us to accept that we might be wrong.

Listening is suspending disbelief. We are openly receiving, paying attention with no preconceived ideas. The only goal is to fully and clearly understand what is being transmitted, remaining totally present to what is being expressed, and allowing it to be what it is. Anything less is not only a disservice to the speaker, but also to yourself. While creating and defending a story in your own head, you miss information that might alter or evolve your own thoughts. If we can go beyond our reflexive response we may find there’s something more beneath that resonates with us or helps our understanding. The new information might reinforce an idea, slightly alter it, or completely reverse it. Listening without prejudice is how we grow and learn as people. More often than not there are no right answers, just different perspectives. The more perspectives we can learn to see, the greater our understanding becomes…Listening, then, is not just awareness; it’s freedom from accepted limitations.

To achieve this level of awareness, says Rubin, you have to be willing to slow down. “Consider how different your experience of the world might be,” Rubin challenges, “if you engaged in every activity with the attention you might give to landing an airplane.” Imagine that. The sheer mental load of sustaining that level of focus is impossible of course, but what if you actively chose certain daily activities to bring your full and complete attention to? Not just the ones you expect to completely focus on, like work, but engaging with your kids, or talking to someone on the phone, or catching up with your partner at the end of the day? What if I could access the creative mindset while helping the girls with their math lessons? The potential I am holding back!

And now I’m going to call myself out directly.

There are those who approach the opportunities of each day like crossing items off a to-do list instead of truly engaging and participating with all of themselves. Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply, the pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet, it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain insight.

I feel the need to give myself some credit here. I am not a very efficient person. I work slowly, deliberately, and carry the daily anxiety and shame of feeling like I could never measure up to others who can really “get stuff done” and somehow make it look easy. That is not, and will probably never be, me. Never once have I considered that my inefficiency, my inability to work quickly without great need, could be anything other than laziness. But, at the same time, I am not a patient person, and patience is paramount.

Patience is required for the nuanced development of your craft. Patience is required for taking in information in the most faithful way possible. Patience is required for crafting a work that resonates and contains all that we have to offer. Every phase of an artist’s work and life benefits from cultivating this very achievable habit. Patience is developed much like awareness: through an acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality, the desire for something to be different than what we are experiencing in the here and now; a wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes, and open them, and find yourself in another place. Time is something we have no control over, so patience begins with the acceptance of natural rhythms.

“Impatience is an argument with reality” is perhaps one of my favorite lines of all time (and you can believe I will be using it on my kids, for better or worse). The fact that the passage of time is completely out of our control has frightened humans for probably as long as we have been aware of time, and it certainly terrifies me. Here we are in the season of rebirth and renewal, awaiting the blooming of our favorite flowers, awaiting the return of consistently pleasant weather, waiting for our seeds to sprout, or the semester to end, or the mid-term elections to bring us hope; waiting, waiting, waiting for something to change, oblivious to the ways that WE are changing every day.

Listen, my friend; listen to the beat of your own heart, then listen for the heartbeat next to you. They might not be “like you.” They might hold different beliefs than yours, they might value different things. They might have even voted for Trump (or they might have voted against him). But, have you ever asked them why? You are only human. They are only human. We are all being human alone, collectively, in the best way that we know how. Ask what that means to them.

Then, listen.

I believe we can put our world back together again one conversation at a time. Who will you start with today?

1. Larson, Jonathan. Rent : the complete book and lyrics of the Broadway musical. New York, Hal Leonard Corporation, 2008.

2. Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023. All further quotes taken from the same source.