The quiet that comes when we are seen

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

This excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Dogfish” found me a few weeks ago, and it has stayed tucked under my ribcage since. The truth of it resonates in me like a gong, like the feeling I get when Soul Writers get free, go deep, and bring something up that feels at once particular to them and also universal, eternal.

The words present a paradox too, of course, because all I want to do is hear your story. And tell mine. It’s what I live for. It’s my living. Literally. I think the longing to tell our stories, and the hunger to know others’ experiences, has to do with a fundamental need in each of us to be seen, heard, understood. To know we’re OK. Sharing our stories can connect us, settle us, make us remember our own and others’ humanity.

I think what’s so powerful about these few lines is that they gesture toward a magma of truth that flows underneath all that longing. To me, the passage speaks of a kind of clearing it’s possible to reach once we’ve traipsed through the woods of our tales, sliced our legs on thorny branches, twisted our ankles on all the uneven ground. Once sifted through our experiences, contacted our essence, and expressed that in some way. There’s a moment – perhaps several across a lifetime of digging into what is true – where we sit for a time in stillness.

Of course, if you’ve lived long enough you know very well that there is no ‘there’ there—no ultimate truth, no specific goal of being human. Life’s pretty indifferent to how we navigate it. In fact, the poem itself, wrapped as it is around those glowing lines above, speaks of that indifference, like here:

And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

It’s not a game we can win. But we can orient ourselves toward points of truth, around throughlines that reveal themselves. I think my own compass is pointed toward the quiet Oliver seems to have found—perhaps toward the end of her life, or maybe even when she first found the medium of poetry to express herself through.

Finding words (or pictures, or movements, or actions or colors or shapes) that represent who we are at our core is a need as central as food, as shelter, as touch. Surely, when that need is met, something in us quiets. Gradually, we start to feel and act less from the need, and live more from its fulfillment.

Whoever edited the excerpt above did so brilliantly, ending at “I just want to be kind.” The quieter I get in my own life, the more that—kindness—emerges as the whole point, as the beating heart of our interconnectedness. Few of us stay in contact with that heart for very long after we are born. Its rhythm is drowned out by survival. If we’re lucky, at some point we remember it’s there. If we’re brave, we set out on the perilous journey back home. Better yet, to paraphrase Ram Dass, we walk each other home.

There are lots of ways this happens. In my world, it happens through telling our stories as abundantly, deeply, and even repetitively as we can. It happens through bearing witness to our own and one another’s lives until we feel truly known. Til we’ve tapped a well of expression that becomes free-flowing, gurgling forth, sustaining us for the rest of our days. Til our desperation to tell about our own journey—and to hear ones that sound like ours—starts to melt. Til our need to know we’re OK expands out into a space of quiet, of kindness, of pure love.

I’ve seen this happen. It’s why I’ve made it my work. I’m grateful to Mary Oliver for once again giving words to something that otherwise defies language, and that in this case recommits me to this truth: I do want to hear the story of your life. I’ve even met a few folks who want to hear mine. If we follow that throughline, that map back to the beating heart, perhaps what we’ll find there is peace. I hope so.