walk with me
on noticing each other to life
“The biosphere, Weber proposes, is the creative expression of a universal desire to be in relationship…Far from the mechanistic metaphors put forward by Darwinism, beings are driven by this longing for encounter…they only become individuals through their fruitful entanglement with each other. Life is ‘interbeing’ – down to the levels of breath, flesh and bone.”
– Hannah Close on Andreas Weber’s work on poetic ecology
Walk with me.
The tree says to the tree, “here, take this,” as the sunned one sends light in the form of liquid sugar into the shaded sapling’s roots.
The crocodile lies with its mouth open, inviting the plover to feed off decaying bits of prey stuck in its teeth, and never snaps its jaw shut.
Competition is a cost, not a reward. A story we’ve mistaken for truth.
The natural world is a shared creative act. A truth we’ve dismissed as story.
Truth is, the body cannot be divided into subparts. Cells and microbes are not your body’s tenants or laborers, but co-creators of your life, as your body is a co-creator of theirs.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words, “all flourishing is mutual.”
Cells flock to heal a wound like starlings form murmurations to protect themselves from predators.
Each bird in a murmuration collaborates to become one body, turning as the others turn, separating and coming together as the group wills. The closer each bird pays attention, the safer the entire swarm.
Sometimes there are five million of them. The sound their wingbeats make all together murmurs through the sky.
Like an orchestra — a murmuration of musicians that moves as one, sounds as one, breathes as one.
An orchestra builds tension through dissonance and resolves the tension by returning to harmony. A murmuration contracts and expands as it flies. A lung.
To set the rhythm before they play, musicians in an orchestra might catch one another’s eyes and take a breath, letting that shared breath unfold into a song of togetherness. Because breath is unifying. It is inherently rhythmic.
There are breath marks written into musical notation. They look like this: ’
I recently saw a friend’s ensemble perform Phillip Glass, Music with Changing Parts. Three compositions, each between 20 minutes and an hour. On stage, my friend asked the audience to take a breath with her before we were to endure the performance.
“Endure” is the right word here. Glass’s music is long and repetitive, almost breathless. It’s created through “cells,” small musical motifs that give a piece its shape and structure, and “phasing,” a technique that gives cells their movement by shifting them in and out of sync. These small variations accumulate slowly over time, making the music's larger shifts felt more than heard.
There were moments during the performance that I’d grow restless, tense, and overstimulated. My eyes found the exits. My body rejected the sound.
But then I would take another breath, like breathing into a stretch, and go deeper in. I felt the sound wave through my body, each cell swaying.
I think of music and math, how celestial bodies might be heard singing a harmonic tune based on mathematical principles and ratios that echo musical rhythms and structures.
I think of Ronald Johnson writing, “Matter delights in music, and became Bach.”
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Sometimes, if you listen closely to an orchestra perform, you can hear the pages turning in between sounds. When there’s a rest, sometimes you can hear a grunt, a sigh, a gasp. I think this makes it feel alive.
And before that, when the musicians are warming up together on stage, all the sounds collide into this. I think it sounds like dreaming.
There’s no official name for this ambiance, but I think there should be. The Chatter. The Loading. The Murmur. Not The Hum, as that’s already taken.
The Hum is a phenomenon that’s been observed in various towns across the world. It describes a persistent, low-frequency droning that many people (but not all) can hear yet can’t quite place.
Sometimes when I listen closely to absolute silence, I find something in it. A texture.
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I once heard someone say the ego loves to seek and never to find. That makes it sound greedy and malcontent, but I experience it another way. A devotional practice.
The only thing this type of seeking finds is more to notice. I find this erotic, in the way Esther Perel sees the erotic as aliveness.
Like looking at someone you love as they dream or stare off, sinking far back into their own mind. Everything you don’t and can’t know about them becoming stark. The desire that follows. The humming.
One kind of love thrives in this uncertainty. It looks and looks at the lover, finds only soft edges and blurred lines. The image never fully develops. It lives on as an open-ended question, an artwork forever unfinished.
As Andreas Weber says, “a practice that makes others alive and, through this, enlivens yourself.”
Another kind of love insists on knowing. It looks without curiosity, maybe because being left to its imagination feels violent. So it yearns to have, to consume, breaking the lover down into digestible, bite-sized parts.
Pay attention. Sit by a window and listen. Watch the rush of grass. See what you can’t hear, the tone and texture of it.
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To help their students along their path toward kenshō, which means “to see one’s true nature,” Zen Buddhists will pose a koan: a paradoxical question that invites you to break away from logic and reason to enter a more visceral experience of the world.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?
Koans are tricky. They ask you to search for what can't be found. They don’t have an answer, which I think is the answer.
Anne Carson said, "Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is. And there seems to be some kind of contract that's already in place between me and the light to say—in this notebook, which no one will ever read—what the light is like today, to get exactly the right words. I don't know what that contract is, but it seems to underlie all the other writing." I hear a koan there.
Whether or not there are ever “the right words,” I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there is that contract, that creative tension—the light asking to be named, the person asking to name it, all the wrong words in the notebook that will never be read.
The unanswerable question and all that’s free to become there.
Writing is my primordial urge to get in touch. I only ever find the wrong words, and the search goes on. This is how I settle between what I know and what I don’t, where love grows.
A way to polish the mirror of my mind, where I find the world looking at itself, wondering.
A persistent droning that I can’t ever quite place, asking me to listen closer.
To the murmur of five million wings beating.
The breath breaking into music.
Oh, you’re still here.
In our whole body together, every atom singing, you noticed me to life.
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