Thinking Too Much and Listening Too Little ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 13, 2024

How many of you got to see the Northern Lights the other night? I found it as thrilling as it was back in May when I got to see them for the very first time in my life. The other night when I suddenly realized that I could see bright pink in the sky from inside the house, I again flooded with a sense of joy. Joy, and urgency. I dropped what I was doing, grabbed my phone and a jacket, and ran outside. The color was amazing, but I realized sometime later that I wanted more, and I got in the car and began driving around. By then much of the color had dissipated, but it was fun to be outdoors with lots of people all seeking the same experience; seeking joy, seeking wonder. What a gift this was: right now, with wars and natural disasters and an incredibly divided country, nature provided a way for everyone to connect: standing outside together, sharing photos. I felt many emotions: joy, awe, and ultimately gratitude.

It’s a blessing to live on Cape Ann, where often it seems we have a ringside seat for so many of nature’s wonders. Not all good ones, of course, but we understand in our bones, living here, the power and creativity of nature and that is a blessing.

I’ve learned a lot since I moved here, but nothing more valuable than the skill of deep listening. There was a foggy day one June, with visibility almost zero. I stepped outside for a moment and heard rain falling. But wait – the pavement on the driveway wasn’t wet. I wasn’t feeling any rain, wasn’t seeing any rain, but I could hear it. The rainy sounds were coming from the woods. I had never known that when it’s very foggy, water condenses on leaves, and then drips to the ground with a loud patter.

One winter afternoon, I ducked out for a quick walk before it got too dark. It began to snow, and I was enjoying listening to the hissing sound of the tiny flakes landing on the dry oak leaves. And as I listened, I realized I could hear other water sounds. I was near a brook, which was bubbling over rocks in the streambed on its way to the sea. Off in the distance I could hear the rhythmic rattle of waves rolling onto the rocky shore and receding. And then even farther off, I could hear the unmistakable sounds of skate blades and pucks, as hockey players enjoyed a game on a nearby frozen pond. I stopped to count all the water sounds and the forms of water: snow, ice, ocean waves, a flowing brook.

I’m an intensely visual person: drawn to forms and colors, shapes and patterns. But here, surrounded by the sounds of Cape Ann, I have learned to listen deeply.

The author of our reading this morning, Robin Wall Kimmerer, realized at a young age that in pursuing traditional botany as a discipline, she was caught between two worlds. There is the world of science as most of us know it, which emphasizes seeing. We study structure. We put items under a microscope. As Kimmerer pointed out, with plants, the goal is to identify and to name them, to find their proper place in the heirarchy. And then botanists decide that they have learned what they need to know, and they move on.

But Kimmerer was raised within an indigenous culture, where the emphasis was always on relationship. For her, identifying a plant was merely the beginning. The important questions for Robin were ‘why does this plant grow next to this other one?’ ‘what is the relationship, the conversation, between the moss and the rock it grows on?, or between the plants and the insects?’ She describes this as not just learning the names of things, but their language, or as she puts it, their songs. Plants and animals are so much more than simply their appearance and structure.

Teaching ourselves to listen, to make an effort to uncover relationships and purpose, encourages us to see everything in the world as animate. And by that, Kimmerer doesn’t just simply mean ‘alive’, but rather, treating everything else as having agency, treating everything as a sentient being, as having its own language beyond what humans can understand.

In exploring this concept of animacy; of plants and animals, even perhaps rocks, as beings, as having personality, Kimmerer returned to the native language of her Potawatomi Nation. People are trying to learn it while the last few native speakers are still here among us. One of her favorite stories was about her discovery of the word “Puhpowee.” “Puhpowee.” And it seems that this is the word that the Potawatomi use to describe the phenomenon of mushrooms bursting through the forest floor. The word translates to: ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.’ So not a sound, exactly, but rather, a force. Kimmerer wrote, “As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 48-49.)

Where does this effort to listen and to understand lead us? Well, it helps us to expand our knowledge, and our boundaries. We think that we love nature, the natural world. But can we, really, if we limit ourselves to our human understanding, and what traditional science teaches us? What might we hear if we begin listening deeply, working to hear the life force that pulses through all things? Listening for Puhpowee?

Last spring, you may remember, I preached quite a bit about the wisdom of plants and the life-giving connections, the reciprocity, between plants, animals, and fungi. We are really at the beginning of our understanding of how plants and animals communicate, and the relationships between them. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, everything we discover points to these beings as having intelligence and wisdom beyond what we have expected. As she said, “I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.” (interview with Krista Tippett, On Being, February 25, 2016.)

Tomorrow is celebrated historically as Columbus Day. In recent years, more and more frequently, the day is being called Indigenous Peoples Day, honoring those who were here to greet Columbus and who have suffered so terribly at the hands of colonizers. But we can and should use this day as an opportunity to improve our awareness of indigenous wisdom and understanding of how the natural world works, honed over thousands of years of listening and trying to understand the non-human forces in the world. We tend to emphasize human activity, human awareness. But science is beginning to point to a world beyond our human language and understanding, and indigenous wisdom can lead us, if we allow it. If we are wise, we will begin to ask more questions about all the connections that exist, so often beyond our vision. How do we integrate traditional science and indigenous ways of understanding? How can we forge stronger connections, and broaden our worldview beyond a human way of being?

Traditional scientific inquiry and indigenous knowledge can be seen as complementing one another; as being two parts contributing to a newly understood whole. Embracing the two parts of knowledge can encourage us both to study and research, and to allow ourselves to feel; to fall in love over and over again with all that is around us. In fact, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s university, the State University of New York, has founded a Center for Native People and the Environment, that will draw on the wisdom of traditional scientific inquiry as well as indigenous ecological knowledge. Seeing and listening, together in one center.

Opening ourselves to a newer understanding of the unity of the creation can guide us to a deeper spiritual life. Rather than the human focus of religion, of what happens to us after we die, what if we engaged more spiritually with the earth as a whole, listening, and accepting that we are surrounded by other presences, other beings, with completely different knowledge and language? How would we live, if we accept that we have a place in the creation, we are a part of it, but that we are only a part?

We might become more loving. We might feel more humility and feel more connection with others.

The aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, is a scientific phenomenon. And yet, it is so much more than that. When I raced outside to join in, to partake of the event, I was not thinking about the cause, about geomagnetic storms, of solar matter striking the earth. I wasn’t really thinking at all. I was caught up in the wordless emotion of the event, struck by the beauty and the power all around me. It was an encounter with the Ineffable; that which is too great for words.

Later one of our hymns began singing itself to me: Do You Hear?
“Do you hear, oh my friend, in the place where you stand,
Through the sky, through the land, do you hear, do you hear?
In the heights, on the plain, in the vale, on the main,
in the sun, in the rain, do you hear, do you hear?” (Singing the Living Tradition, #112)

My hope for us all is that we can learn to hear, to listen more, to sort out the sounds of our days so that the hum, the murmur, and the Puhpowee of the world we don’t have language for can emerge. May listening become a spiritual practice, and a spiritual experience for us all, that we may broaden our understanding and our deep love of this Creation. And may we feel the unity present, and that despite our differences, we are all a part of this Ineffable whole.

Amen.