Knock on the Sky and Listen

When was the last time you asked a question not as a means to an end but as an offering to the unknown?

When was the last time you listened to life? Do you speak to it, still? In joy and despair, in celebration and in loss, do you share your secrets with the world?

Out of conversation with some great and unknowable mystery, from the land of no-words and nonsense, from the realm where everything yet to be exists,

A question emerges; an answer arrives. Thus we open our eyes for the first time.

If we are lucky, we live our lives in constant dialogue with that singular and infinite force of creation which flows through everything we can ever know. But we can never know the unknowable.

Giving it a name feels like it might help us grow closer, and perhaps this is the first way in which we forget to listen.

If we are lucky, we learn first that words are approximations, that the best we can do is trace shadows on the wall and call it the sun. It is easy to forget.

Most of us are not so lucky. Most of us barely get the chance to ask our first questions before we are convinced that it is our job to find answers. But the best questions have no answers. The best questions are doorways into exploration, invitations into conversation. I imagine holding my hand out to life and saying with no words at all, “may I have this dance?”

Waking up before the sun, my mind is empty; all I know is that it is dark, and the smell of fresh pastries is making it’s way through the rain, settling under my nose.

I remember when the first poem sprang up within me and forced its way out into the world. I remember hearing the first line call out from a place which felt otherworldly yet also entirely like home. Like a bubble rising from the depths of the ocean, steadfast and inevitable and terribly fragile. In a trance I watched the page before me fill with words that were certainly not mine; yet they were undoubtedly of me, sprouting from a place so essential and beyond myself that I had no choice but to accept them. And with each passing year their meaning becomes more and more profound.

I remember every word of that poem. Those lines are as much a part of me as my bones, my blood. To forget would be like living without a heart. To forget would be to die.

I think the ocean is a poet.

It may be one of the great tragedies of humanity- that we try so hard to hear, only to forget how effortless it is to listen.

It may also be the case that one of the great medicines for humanity is to practice listening. Bit by bit, we may remember that we are in conversation with something greater than our singular selves. We may remember that we don’t need to know anything, nor do we need to search for answers; we only need to knock on the sky and listen.

And so with these thoughts in mind, and a tender mix of love and melancholy and joy and hope and awe in my heart, I hit the road, southbound from Pescadero, meandering back to Cardiff, stopping to take photos along the way. I was looking for clarity. and in some sense I found it. but mostly I found more questions. mostly I just sat, and wondered, and let these wordless questions work their way through me. mostly I just listened.

and I don’t know that I’ve ever realized how much courage it takes to listen. For what else could it be that allows you to invite life in as it rips you open, breaks your heart and brings you to your knees? Maybe it is faith; maybe faith and courage are branches of the same tree. Maybe it is not so complicated to believe that the more we are broken open, the more life we can allow in. and who am I to deny that? who am I to dictate how life must move through me?

and so I sit. and I listen. and I watch an entire lifetime flash before my eyes.