Deep Listening with the Land
Learning to Hear the Natural World Through Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Earth Sensory Perception is a subsection of Our Uncertain Future and represents a compilation of essays on animistic nature connections in the modern world. These essays are only available for free for two weeks before they are paywalled.
What is Deep Listening
There are many ways to connect with the natural world around you such as sit spots and forest walks but to truly be in sync with the living world, feel the sensation of communing with your environment, and be able to practice animistic nature communication, you must learn deep listening.
Deep listening is a spiritual concept represented across cultures that means to listen with your whole body to what is said and what is unsaid, listening to people’s hearts, listening to the heart of the land and listening to the heart of connection with all of existence. Deep listening is inner quiet, still awareness, and waiting. Deep listening happens when we turn off the chatter of our minds and drop into a softer attention, allowing us to receive intuitive wisdom from outside of ourselves.
My Experience Deep Listening
During the pandemic when we first moved off grid and my nervous system was dysregulated, I spent hours walking the public lands around my house through the sagebrush and into the forest. At the peak of my nature walks, I often stopped to sit with a tree. Without knowing it, I was practicing deep listening.
