“Moffsen, Mama? Blewstreen blang comar?”
With her consummately tiny voice, Miss S. spent hours practicing the art of conversation . . . long before she had a comprehensible vocabulary. At the age of two she could sit on a park bench at the playground for hours, forgoing the jungle gym in order to talk to me in this otherworldly pre-language. As she squared her frame toward my body and leaned in to our summer confidence, I found it uncanny the way she held me in full regard, intonating her statements with such perfectly cued facial expressions and body language. At times I believed I just was not hearing her right . . . that surely there were discernable words in her speech.
Listening eagerly, I leaned in with attentive silence; through body and voice, each of us offered up our speech with as much joy as if we had been speaking the same language.
As we took a bike ride today I was reminded of these early confidences we had, of how they have become more rich with time. On topics ranging from the prevention of cancer, to a silly thing one of her peers said at school, to a memory of the mosquitoes she encountered on a trip to India, to the plot of her friends’ current school-yard game, the trip around the neighborhood was laced with an unending string of her anecdotes, queries, memories, concerns, to which I listened attentively, but offered little.
“I’m so joyful right now,” she said with a small sigh, walking her bike as we neared the house.
“I know,” I replied, smiling.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because I am listening to you with my whole body.”
Listening with the body. In one of the most beautiful passages in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, the geisha Sayuri speaks of the love and attentiveness involved in this process:
Usually when he first came, the Chairman talked for a time about his workday. He might tell me about troubles with a new product, or about a traffic accident involving a truckload of parts, or some such thing. Of course I was happy to listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them. He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket. So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke. (422)
Sometimes listening with the body requires a silent attentiveness; sometimes it requires questioning; sometimes it requires affirmation; in all cases it requires an utter and complete attention to the other, a practice that Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as love.
There are people with whom I cultivated such a listening, people with whom the space of conversation habitually opened up into moments of deep recognition; yet even the most spiritual of these were not immutable against the forces of death and busyness, a misplaced desire to protect, distractions, the loss of trust.
Over time, I forgot the value of nurturing my own capacity to listen with the body, to foster it in my most valued relationships. My children, with their need to be seen and fully recognized, have reminded me to my better self.
After spending what seems like an eon in the fluorescent purgatory of the quasi-competent, I have spent the past two years slowly relearning the art of loving conversation so as to listen to my children with my whole body, being present to them in what they say and what they do not say, and honoring a space for dialogue each and every day, no matter whether that dialogue is spoken or silent. . .
It’s a process that works best, as one could anticipate, when we are alone. . . which is why I am rather glad the holidays are over. It seems strange to say that the time I spend with my kids is more rich and meaningful when their school term is in session, but those three hours we have alone together after full days apart are pure gold.
