Listening: A primitive form of love

I was born a romantic, not the kind in our typical Bollywood movies but the 19th century English kind that is in tune with one’s inner world and finds the greatest retreat in nature. On my personal readings and research into the lives of trees, I got to know that trees do reciprocate to sound and touch. Well not entirely in ways where we could expect trees transforming into live beings but in ways that impacted their growth and inner health. Sound and touch (I wonder) or in other words talking and touching, just like we human respond to being nurtured.

When I first relocated to a remote village in Majuli Island, one of the first things that intrigued me was how there were still places amidst the growing concrete jungle where you could only see rich greenery as far as your eyes could take you. Where one could witness the bounties of the village in its acres and acres of black sesame fields, yellow fields of mustard all fluttering like daffodils Wordsworth had once described.

For initial part of work, I was asked to stay in the community in a small room that housed the basic necessities needed for any female. When I describe basic, I mean the kind where I also had the chance of bathing in the river on a November evening because we were out of running water. Time passed by and I had well-adjusted in the village, but I was also deeply burdened with work as the organization's foundation day was on its way and I was asked to lead the content which also required hosting for the entire event, eventually leaving me overworked and tired.

On one such shoot day; my senior colleague could realise I was stressed and was in the peak point of anxiety. As the sun was about to settle down for the day and we were packing, she asked me if I would like to take a walk with her. Quite honestly, all I wanted was to get back to my room and sleep but something inside of me was ready to affirm to her proposition.

As the village was drenched in the colors of dusk, we were walking side by side in utter silence and up until darkness prevailed none of us initiated a conversation. But once the night befell, she asked me how I was liking the place and everything else that had to do with my arrival to a remote village. In some other time, I would have given a very generic reply to a work colleague but there was something about the darkness or how not being able to see her made me somewhat vulnerable. And little did I know that I would keep talking to a point where I did not even realise the joining of a third party in our walk. She and a student from school who had just joined us was listening with patience only adding every now and then to inquire more.

The three of us reached the end point of the village which was the river Lohit, the other side of which was another village named Karchang. As the night unflurried more of its darkness we made our way back home. Each conversing in that pitch darkness guided by nothing else but our instincts.

And that was when it clicked. “Some days, only the heart can feel what the eyes cannot see”. I repeated it once again and I realized that even in that pitch darkness of the night where one could not even see one’s shadow, my heart could feel that it was cared for. I never saw what her expressions were like when I started my monologue, but the reason I continued without being triggered by the anxiety of being judged, was because I could feel it in my heart that I was cared for.

Fast forward to 2022, where the world has started indulging in concepts of forest baths, and newer techniques of psychotherapy. This leaves me to think, don’t they all revolve around the idea of being heard, without any prejudices just like my colleague did that night? And the answer keeps coming back as Yes.

After all someone had rightly said, Listening is indeed the primitive form of love.

Source: Medium

Writer: Debahuti Gogoi