The Conversation

On listening long enough to reply

There are moments in the Archives when I realise I have stopped listening.

Curiously, they are often the quietest of moments.

The cloth lies before me. Needle threaded. Hands resting.

Nothing moves.

It looks like attendance.

But sometimes it is something else entirely.

Sometimes it is hesitation disguised as listening.

…

The other morning I found myself returning to a simple teaching.

The Buddha did not ask people to believe him.

He invited them to come and see.

Not to agree.

Not to become certain.

Simply to attend.

I found myself offering those words back to myself.

Not because I doubted the cloth.

Because I doubted my own next stitch.

…

It occurred to me that perhaps I had been asking the wrong thing of the work.

Somewhere along the way, I began waiting for the cloth to choose.

As though my task were only to listen until the answer appeared.

But conversations do not work that way.

You cannot have a conversation if you are only waiting.

Nor if you are only speaking.

A conversation asks something gentler.

Listen.

Reply.

Listen again.

The reply need not be perfect.

It only needs to be honest enough for the conversation to continue.

…

Perhaps this is why making sometimes becomes difficult.

We become so afraid of imposing ourselves that we forget the work also needs our voice.

Not our certainty.

Our presence.

Every respectful stitch says,

“This is what I heard.”

The next moment of looking asks,

“And now…what do you have to say?”

The cloth answers differently because the conversation has changed.

…

I suspect this is true of more than cloth.

Friendships.

Marriage.

Meditation.

Walking through a wood.

Standing beneath the moon.

The moment we begin predicting the conversation, we stop listening to it.

The moment we stop listening, we begin speaking only to ourselves.

…

So these days I am trying something simpler.

Attend.

Notice.

Reply.

Attend again.

One stitch is enough.

Then…

Come and see.

Namasté

Joe