When God Winks at You

A short story about listening as medicine

Just now I remembered a story I want to tell: the most magical / divine intervention / storybook perfect moment of my life.

I was invited as a guest at an international conference of activists in Canada. Because it was a meeting of mostly North American progressives, the conference was pretty tense. The typical lefty circular firing squad stuff, everyone breaking into factions and caucuses and identity groups, all antagonising each other. When I arrived I had let the hosts know I have a lot of facilitation experience so they could call on me if they needed anything.

As the days passed, the tension increased until it felt like the event could fall to pieces. So I was asked to help. One of the hosts gave me an assignment: “People are not hearing each other, their defences are up — can you run a workshop on listening?”

Happy to oblige, I offered a listening workshop; 10 or 20 people joined. We were in a remote island in British Columbia, 3 ferries away from the mainland. This is a place of extremely beautiful landscapes, abundant wildlife, gargantuan inyourface nature. To start my workshop, I took the group outside for a short walk from the main meeting hall down to the water’s edge.

While we walked, I gave instructions for a kind of guided meditation: “We will walk quietly and then sit in silence at the beach. We’re going to practice listening with a particular state of attention: any sound that arrives in your awareness, you’re going to welcome it as if you were listening to a symphony. Any sound gets the same quality of attention: the cry of the eagle, the quiet slap of waves on the pebble shore, a sneeze, or a lawnmower engine, whatever sounds you notice, welcome them all with the same anticipatory pleasure and curiosity.”

It took us about 3 minutes to reach the shore. I gave my final instruction about listening for the meticulous orchestration of every sonic element, and then we dropped into silent meditation. I shit you not, within 30 seconds of me shutting up, a family of whales breached the water’s surface in the bay directly ahead of us, throwing great spouts of spray high into the air, enormous, loud, and ecstatic. We would have missed this sight if we had still been in the conference hall arguing about politics, but here we were, awestruck and grateful witnesses to one of nature’s most glorious scenes.

I call it magical or divine intervention because this was so unbelievably perfect: an immediate reward for our little group deciding to abandon animosity and seek peace. This is the prize for curiosity, receptivity and wonder: sometimes God will reveal himself to you for a second with unattenuated glory.

So. Why did this story come to mind this morning, 7 years after it happened? Yesterday I wrote about my recent experiences with depression, the overwhelming sense of not-right-ness, my desperate desire for things to be any way other than how they are.

I have a hypothesis: that there’s a way of relating to the depression that alleviates much of the suffering; it doesn’t have to always be an excruciating fight.

I’ve written elsewhere about my exploration of psychedelics: I'm endlessly curious about the effects of psilocybin, mdma, and ketamine, how they repattern my thoughts and tissues, how they open possibilities, how they invite insights & gobbledegook into my awareness. Well I could take the same attitude to this depressed state of mind as I bring to any other altered state of consciousness. Can I write a trip report for depression? Day 9. Still high af. Experiencing thoughts of futility and despair. Excuse-making machine in overdrive. Desire for candy has peaked.

Instead of fixating on everything that’s wrong with this state of mind: can I listen to it like a symphony? My favourite music is not all easy to listen to. There are chapters of extreme tension and discomfort. But I stay with the song because I trust the intelligence of the composer. Even in the most discordant pieces, they’re trying to show me something. Usually if I can be patient, if I can stay curious and follow along, they’ll take me out the other side of the tension and guide me to the place of resolution. In retrospect I can see the meaning in the discordant phrase, I can retroactively trace the harmony that was always there. It’s never random noise, though the music is sometimes too complex to appreciate on the first pass.

So that’s my assignment to myself. I’m in a moment where I’m feeling depressed: can I observe the experience as if I were listening to a symphony orchestrated by an intelligent Composer? How might the experience change if I treat it all as intentional, as if everything in its proper place? When I’m composing my own music or listening to music created by someone else, I know how to find that cognitive & embodied posture of presence, curiosity, welcome, compassion, enthusiasm… I know how to appreciate the highs with the lows, I can be receptive to the moments of tension, stuckness, boredom, pain, grief and fear all with the same anticipatory pleasure, safe in the knowledge that this part only makes sense in context with the next part.

I know there are degrees of sweetness that can only be experienced alongside bitterness — you don’t get one without the other. So that’s my homework: can I bring the attitude of patient curious anticipation to the bitter moments, notice how this part makes me pucker & wince, and instead of recoiling and running away, choosing instead to say, “Wow! Holy moly that is intense! …and what comes next?”