You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
But what if you don’t know what your animal body loves? Perhaps to know requires a new way of listening. Smelling. Seeing. Being. Recently I heard psychologist Allan Schore speaking on a podcast about Freud’s concept of “evenly suspended attention” or as Schore calls it, wide ranging attention – a holistic way of listening, not just to the words being said, but the body language and tonality of the speaker. Schore believes that much more can be understood about the speaker when listening with the right brain, and a deeper connection is possible between speaker and listener.
One of my goals for 2025 is to listen more – and not just to human words. Studies are showing that you can hear plants and algae photosynthesize underwater. We all knew you could hear whales, but apparently everything underwater is humming at their own frequency. Here’s an amazing soundscape of California’s Central Coast. There’s a famous (in some circles) Song for Gathering Mushrooms by the Baka Pygmies of Cameroon that gives me the chills each time I hear it. Someone once told me that this had been analyzed with all the other sounds of the forest and this song has its own frequencies of sound that weave into the frequencies of all the other creatures sounds in the forest. They are part of the whole.
A form of wide range seeing is what is used for finding mushrooms. You need to soften your gaze and unfocus. Foraging and gathering is more of an instinctual scanning of the forest for pattern disruption, not a linear search. Along with readjusting listening and seeing, I’ve been trying to use my sense of smell more. Inspired by my truffle hound, Flora Jayne, and her deep inquisitiveness with smelling, when I pause to let her sniff, I also sniff. Sunday morning in my neighborhood smells like delicious food, more sweet than savory. I can smell when there’s more seaweed in the bay. Far off ice in Alaska on the North westerlies. The rapture of soil after a big rain. And there is exquisite pleasure in taking the time to smell. Now that truffle season is here, it’s one of my deepest pleasures to just smell them and let their volatile compounds run my meridians. I don’t try to identify or quantify, but rather, stay present in the experience of aroma.
This too is part of “wide ranging attention”; to explore the world through the rich, sensual experience that it is. Our right brain is receiving pre-verbal, wholistic communication, and so I assume that developing our other senses run more through right brain processing than left. The right brain is our place of creativity, intuition, instinct and compassion. While undervalued in our world, these are fierce survival tools in an unknowable universe. Instinct is our animal selves. Much has been written recently about the incredible ways in which animals may resemble us – they communicate! They are sentient! They have personalities! It's astonishing it took us this long to even consider that other creatures on earth may be complex. We are human animals and in so any societies we've lost so much of our perception and interconnectedness with our world.
And our wary animal selves, if developed, could also come to experience life on planet earth in a much more multi-sensory and holistic way. We would have more being, less knowing, and different ways of doing. We could listen to the murmurs of seaweed and sing along with mushrooms and move through the woods and coast fully part of it, experiencing the multi-sensory stories constantly being told in this beautiful world.
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