When I was little, I was convinced the old white pine tree next to our home and the puffy clouds in the sky were telling each other the most amazing stories. I thought that if I could just figure out the right way to listen, I’d be able to hear them.
Tell me. You're so tall— oh tell me your stories please. I promise— I will stretch to hold them.
Determined and achingly curious, my small arms and legs climbed that pine tree nearly every day. I can remember feeling as if I was trying to open my senses like a sunflower—all bright petals following sunlight—so I could catch cloud stories and tree tales.
Clinging to the sticky trunk, right ear pressed to smooth bark, left ear tilted to the sky, nose filled with resin and wet air, I was a tiny girl antennae on a wind-swayed pine.
That was my first experience of full contact listening (which I now realize is me listening with my body.)
Did I eventually hear the tree and cloud stories? I did!
In the years before other people’s disbelief eroded my trust in the stories my body heard, I co created countless tree and cloud and girl stories.
Tree and cloud and me—I am tiny but fierce with belonging.
Years later, after navigating the saw-toothed gift…
…of recovering from sexual trauma, I rediscovered listening with my body.
Now, I regularly sense the conversations happening in the ecosystem where I live.
trees and clouds, whispering grasses and laughing streams, murders of crows tangle with chimes of wrens booming bullfrogs and creaking katydids talk to the night.
Because I love it…
I experimented with adding writing to my listening practice.
I discovered that if I’m willing to let my body transmute sound, rhythm, and gesture into words on a page, the hand-on-pen, pen-scratching-paper act of writing restores me.
Listening with my body + writing refills resilience depleted by the intensity of the times through which we are living.
It’s such a relief.
Tracie Nichols 