On Listening and the Eight-One Percent {Allume Post}
I spent last weekend at Allume. I sat in a room full of writers, beautiful women who weave words into beauty, and women that say their words plainly too. There were artists and idea curators, poets and comedians, strategists and lullaby-hummers, babbling brooks and roaring lions – all clickety-clacking away on keyboards and little screens: writers writing, writers being.
I sat among them and read their words, watched them laugh long around small tables in the hotel bar and on panels up on stage, speak intentionally at podiums and tucked into quiet corners.
All these writers, all we humans are telling stories – the stories we have lived and the one’s we’re living right now. We write the story out in blog posts and book chapters, on the hearts of our families, the lives of our friends and neighbors. We write them broken and beautiful, whether we admit it or not, because we all are broken and beautiful.
I heard it this weekend and I’ve heard it before: a small survey once found that eighty one percent of folks have a book penned up inside them. (A New York Times op-ed sites a survey in early 2002 by a small Michigan publisher.)
I have no aspirations of writing a book, but I wonder if the universal drive to tell our stories is because really, we are all a story being written.
And if we’re all full of story, perhaps the greatest gift we can give is our listening. Perhaps the 81% is less about written words or unpublished books and more about listening ears and time spent silent.
And when we listen, we hear through the filter of our own broken, beautiful life stories. It is in our slowing and our sitting, in our focused attention, in our listening with minds engaged, hearts humbled, and spirits sensitive that we begin to hear new melodies and chords we could not perceive alone. The listening changes us as much as the writing.
I like to talk and I like to write. But it was the quiet of listening ears that spoke deepest to my heart this weekend. It was the moments my voice grew quiet and my heart held the words of others that I saw new, beautiful, broken perspectives that challenged me and grated against me, soothed my soul, and called me home.
I am home now, and longing to press into the listening: the abiding kind in the presence of Jesus; and the real life kind with my sisters and children and the friends that gather in our living room; and the artful kind, in books and blog posts and paint-stained canvases.
I am home, and I am listening.
{Would you tell me friends, what helps you to listen, really listen? I have much to learn here.} Read the other Allume posts by attendees here.