Horizon

- Dana Roy

Re-reading the post Shut up and Listen, it strikes me that I have not at all been able to capture how one’s senses seem to reach out into the world. Just as your eyes find the horizon when you are out in the open, just as the moonlight lights up all of that great distance into the beyond, just as you look into the horizon and somehow you are present there at the far end of where your eyes take you, so too you discover a horizon of sound.

Photo: Shataf Figar

Let me try and explain better. If you stop, shut your eyes and listen in a place like the Sundarbans, your ears first take in the sounds closest to you, waves, fiddler crabs, mudskippers then your sense of hearing seems to expand till you hear things maybe five feet away, a bird perhaps, or a frog, then it expands further to take in more that surrounds you, adding to the symphony. You ears steadily seem to take you further and further away from the place you are standing. There is no measurable way to know how far you have heard, and sounds do get fainter and fainter till you can just about make out that that is as far as you can hear. How far your horizon of sound is, will never truly be known, not in the terms with which you can measure a horizon of sight. It is also a horizon that you will never experience in a piece of music no matter how complex, because it does not exist, the instruments are finite and there is nothing beyond.

How far can your ears take you?  I am reminded of a discussion during our workshops about what it feels like to be underwater, and the quality of sound under water. I remember floating in the sea just off Pattaya, listening under water. The sounds are alien, unidentifiable because of the lack of language to express them, yet they are distinct even through the quality that water gives them. Sound travels further in water.  How far does it take you? How far away in the ocean is what you hear? One thinks of the great whales that communicate to each other over enormous distances. The connectivity and connectedness of it. I wonder about the bamboo game. And the connectedness of it. How each actor is connected to every other actor in the space, through nothing but bamboo sticks held between them by the tip of one finger on each hand.

When you remember the kinds of listening you experience in the natural places of the world you know that the world is connected. It is the same quality of listening that is required of you in the bamboo game. It is as if the Earth has been playing that game for millions of years and has become so good at it, so adept that the patterns are organic and complex. Actually it is the other way around, we attempt in the bamboo game to replicate the organic quality of the living Earth.

Photo: Shataf Figar

And I wonder what happens if an outside impulse is introduced. So if the world is so connected what happens if humanity provides a push from the outside. How does the world adjust? What happens when there are more external pushes. How long does it take to break the connectedness? How long before a bamboo falls?

Photo: Shataf Figar

Or is it that the Earth adjusts. Millions of years of connection, each organism connected to another, each wave connected with another, cannot just be broken, but the ripples of an outside impulse are seen coursing through the connections. How do we plug in again to this constant communication, how do we shut up and listen? How do we connect, spiritually, personally, collectively, consciously? And it will need a disciplined consciousness, because currently we are shouting so loudly that there is not a chance of listening.

In the bamboo game when you are listening and connected, it is not hard to know what you have to do. It is not a revolutionary change that you bring about in others, or yourself, it’s but a slight shift of gears, not even that. It is subtler than that. It is a listening, through your ears, neck, back, a listening through your body. How do we do find that quality of listening in our relationship with the Earth? What new horizon will be opened up to us then?


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