How my voice has led me home

In ETERNAL ECHOES, John O’Donohue dedicates his focus to “our yearning to belong”.

“The voice comes from your soul. It is the voice of the eternal longing within you, and it confirms you as a relentless pilgrim on the earth. There is something in you that no one or nothing else in the world is able to meet or satisfy… When you befriend this longing, it will keep you awake and alert to why you are here on earth.”

“Befriending this longing”  has meant allowing my voice to guide me. While my path has taken me through varied terrain, which confused me as to my focus, my mission, my dream, my work, I did, in my early to mid-30s begin to recognize my voice was guiding me somehow.   As I came to understand that being still and listening was the way into my voice, I began to recognize them as a pair, a team, a relationship.

Donohue suggests, “Even without the outside lover, you can become the beloved. When you awaken in appreciation and love for yourself, springtime awakens in your heart. Your soul longs to draw you into love for your self. When you enter your soul’s affection, the torment ceases in your life…”

“…breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable…Your body is open physically to the world, and the well of your mind flows out of ancient ground.” It is because I would experience a flow and connectedness of the sort he describes that I continued to follow my voice. I needed to sing to open to this state I longed for.

I still do, though the ways I have been engaged with my voice have altered, varied and deepened beyond singing and sound, beyond oral and aural experiences into exploration of silence and “the listening for the hearing” as I wrote in a poem 20 years ago. In this case, I mean I listened for and then, to what I heard, and what I heard, I wrote down:

There among the strands hung from the weeping willow tree
 
beyond the dappled area, the sun called out to me


I listened as the river lapped the rocks along the shore

The colors, bright when under water, dry now, shone no more


The ripples, though, I noticed sang as sweetly as a bird

and I, without a thought of it, was lulled by what I heard


to where the shadows clustered underneath the willow's wings

I found myself reclining to embrace those little things


The whisper of the wind upon translucent silvered tongues
which sang soliloquies that seemed to seek my very soul
so gently rocked me rhythmically in sync with its slow sway

I felt the darkness, cool and damp, the green and solid earth


I knew the fullness, rich in must, upon which I relied
while called distinctly, silently the air from all around


Invisible, accountable, supporting all I know...


"All here", thought I, in pregnant peace, awarded by the sound

and hearing for the listening that I that moment found

                                         ~ winter '96

I share this not as product, but as a sample of process, the aspect or character of voice and its requisite intimate – listening, which has become an essential part of who I am, a process that fascinates me and has sustained me. Or perhaps it is simply my home.

This poem in no way sounds like the voice I use in my daily life, or even in writing, but it does absolutely reflect my nature and interests. Sometimes, what we hear when we listen to our silence may be unrecognizable in style, yet it speaks to us in substance.

“Perhaps Nature senses the longing that is in us…She takes us into the tranquility of her stillness if we visit her. We slip into her quiet contemplation and inhabit for a while the depth of her ancient belonging.”

~ in deep gratitude to John O’Donohue