✦ A Listening Practice
Fourteen Feet Down
In October of 1988, the composer Pauline Oliveros climbed down into a cistern.
It was a decommissioned water tank at Fort Worden, in Washington state — two million gallons’ worth, empty, fourteen feet below the ground. She went down with a trombonist and a recording engineer to find out what the space would do. What it did was hold every sound for forty-five seconds. They played one note and the room took it, turned it over, and kept handing it back, handing it back.
They made a record down there. And Oliveros came up with a phrase for what had happened to her in the dark: deep listening. She meant it as a pun at first — she spent the rest of her life exploring the deeper meanings those words kept handing back, kept handing back.
Hearing happens to us. It’s involuntary. But listening is something we choose. We can practice it and we need to, because most of us were never taught how.
Here’s an idea for how we could revisit that spaciousness of deep listening, and it takes less than five minutes:
Sit down somewhere ordinary — a kitchen, a parked car, a porch. Set a timer for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. No music. If you’re sleepy or sitting with low energy, feel free to keep your eyes open. Sit. Listen. Let the time run out.
You may notice (maybe somewhere in the second minute?) the illusion of silence cracking open. There’s always something. A refrigerator. A road. Our own breathing, which is louder than we remember. Birds. The building settling. Something in the walls.
After the timer goes off, try to write down everything you remember hearing, in the order you became aware of it. No commentary, poetry, or associations. Just words that name the sounds, what they were, when they arrived.
Sit with your list another minute. Which sounds had you been hearing all along, but not listening to?
This is just one exercise to help us attend to that gap — between hearing, which so often happens passively, unconsciously — and listening, which we have to choose, which we have to choose, again.
And that’s exactly where this issue of Haden’s Resource Guide lives. Back in May, we gave space to looking as we considered Vision and the Seer Archetype. This month, we’ll work to press our ears against the walls of our lives.
As spiritual directors, dream workers, contemplatives, and mystics-in-the-making our listening (especially in the silences) is much of what gives our words and our lived responses their power, compassion, playfulness, and vitality.
Monastic silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of possibility. Mystical silence is more like a womb or a field — a generative, fruitful space that, somehow, yields a wisdom beyond knowledge, an awareness that is not bounded by the parameters of logic.
— James K.A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark (2026)
✦ In This Issue
Quick Dip · A prophet asleep in a wasteland, a piece of music with no notes in it, and a walk with no destination
Full Sitting · An acoustic ecologist on the extinction of quiet, and a drummer losing his hearing
Deep Dive · Two mystics and a modern contemplative that have helped countless people listen well to their own lives
Deep Listening · A five-day practice framework — an original Haden resource, yours to keep
✦ The Resource Guide
Eight resources on listening, silence, and the discipline of attention
We’ve organized these by time investment, as always. The first one asks only that you look at a painting.
🌾 Quick Dip ~15 minutes
Frederic Leighton, Elijah in the Wilderness (1878)
Go and stand on the mountain before the LORD, and, look, the LORD is about to pass over, with a great and strong wind tearing apart mountains and smashing rocks before the LORD. Not in the wind is the LORD. And after the wind an earthquake. Not in the earthquake is the LORD. And after the earthquake — fire. Not in the fire is the LORD. And after the fire, a sound of minute stillness.
(1 Kings 19:11, translation by Robert Alter)
Many of us are familiar with this story of Elijah’s encounter with the ‘still, small voice’ that renowned Hebrew scholar Robert Alter renders “a sound of minute stillness.” Notice how even a little poetic unfamiliarity can be a doorway into deep(er) listening.
The scene of this encounter is noticeably absent from the works of canonized painters working with biblical scenes. Perhaps the kind of listening we’re talking about resists image, eludes our sight. Let the scene in Leighton’s painting of food and rest that sets the stage for Elijah’s encounter speak to you as we prepare to sharpen our aural attentions.
John Cage, 4’33” (1952)
If you’ve never experienced Cage’s audacious composition, the link above is your ticket to joining the audience of its debut. You’re invited to give five minutes to that before reading more about the piece and this exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art, or listen to Cage talk about his relationship to sound, to inner listening, to silence.
A Soundwalk
Have a walk outside: into your backyard, into the city, or simply to the mailbox. Leave your phone inside. Leave your destination open. As sounds arrive, name them silently — car, crow, gate, water, someone’s television — then let it go and wait for the next.
As thoughts outside your local soundscape creep in, try to notice that, too … and let them go. Return to that awareness of sounds and how you name them for yourself.
This is such an interesting experiment in a place you know well. You may be opened up to hear what you don’t expect to hear. You may find things firing in your imagination and generative spaces long after you’ve gone back inside, back to work, back to a normal mode of listening more passively.
Maybe try the same experiment in the same place at different hours of the day. We listen to a dear friend who needs us with a certain level of care and attention. What happens when we bring some of the same care and attention to the places we live; the spaces adjacent and immediately connected to home?
🔥 Full Sitting ~an hour
“Silence and the Presence of Everything” — Gordon Hempton
Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist who has recorded dawn breaking on six continents, thunder in the Kalahari, and the inside of a hollow Sitka spruce. He continues to explore the nature of quiet — how it is not the absence of sound, it’s the absence of noise.
That’s part of why he’s often credited with inventing “silence activism.” We live in a country where there are fewer and fewer places left where a person can sit for fifteen minutes without hearing the engine of a vehicle or plane.
This interview with Krista Tippett is a wonderful way to start experiencing Hempton’s recordings and listen deeply to the forces that compel him to attend to some of our most precious spaces.
Sound of Metal (2019)
A drummer begins to lose his hearing … And other losses quickly mount …
One of the true accomplishments of the film Sound of Metal is that it attempts to put viewers inside the protagonist’s unexpected hearing loss — the sound design moves between his ears and ours until you stop being certain which one you’re in. Eventually, Reuben, the drummer, lands in a rural community of deaf people, where he’s handed a pen and a notebook and told to sit in a room every morning until something happens.
A note: this is a beautiful, but painful and demanding film. If you’re carrying a loss right now, consider saving it for later, or watching it with someone.
📖 Deep Dive many hours
Meditations of the Heart and “The Sound of the Genuine” — Howard Thurman
“There is in you, something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”
Thurman was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and then at Boston University for more than two decades — a mystic who spent his working life inside institutions, and one of the formative spiritual voices of the civil rights movement.
In May of 1980, on what turned out to be his last trip away from home, he gave the baccalaureate address at Spelman College. He told a room full of graduating young Black women that there is something in each of them that is listening for what he called the sound of the genuine in themselves — that it is theirs alone, that no one else can hear it for them, and that a life spent taking its signals from other people’s drumbeats will end up somewhere that isn’t yours. He was eighty, he had less than a year to live — these were not abstractions for Thurman.
Emory keeps the audio and a transcript, free. Listen to it rather than read it if you can; notice his pacing, how he leaves room between sentences the way a person does who has stopped being in a hurry.
Then take up Meditations of the Heart — short pieces meant for daily use, written by a man who assumed his readers were tired and had things to do. Its endurance in print over the last 70 years is a testament to its enduring gifts.
Practical Mysticism — Evelyn Underhill
If you’re familiar with Underhill’s writing, it may be her enormous book Mysticism (1911). Practical Mysticism (1915) is a much slimmer volume she wrote to make a single argument: that mysticism is not a specialism for monastics and the unusually gifted, but an ordinary human capacity available to people with jobs and families and commutes. It begins, she argues, with nothing more exotic than learning to give something your whole attention. The first movements she describes are simply recollection and attention.
It’s also a potent artifact written in the last months of peace and went to press in the first weeks of the Great War. In a season of brute force and horror, Underhill insisted that the contemplative attitude becomes more necessary under those conditions, not less, because a person who cannot attend to anything is of no use to anyone.
The Way of the Heart — Henri Nouwen
Nouwen went to the desert fathers and came back with three words — solitude, silence, prayer — and a diagnosis. He thought the people in helping professions were the most at risk of all: busy, compassionate, articulate, useful, and hollowing out. His claim is that solitude is not a break from ministry but the furnace where the self gets remade, that silence is what guards the fire, and that without both, our listening slowly becomes a technique.
It’s a hundred pages, it was written for tired people, and it will find you wherever you actually are. Some of the other voices in this Resource Guide highlight ways to listen and respond to a world of diminishing silences — Nouwen is asking what any of it has to do with the work in front of us on Monday.
✦ Deep Listening
We wrote this one — a five-day practice framework to help us return to the never-ending work of learning to listen. The first three days move outward — the room, the world, another person. The last two carry us inward.
I. The Room · Outward — Begin where you are, with a timer and no music.
II. The World · Outward — Walk out without a phone or a destination. Name each sound, then let it go.
III. Another Person · Outward — Twenty minutes of listening without fixing, advising, or reassuring.
IV. The Body · Inward — A short form of Focusing, the practice developed by Eugene Gendlin: finding the wordless sense of a thing, and a word for it, before the mind has explained it to us.
V. The Asking · Inward — Put a question to what you found, and then wait. This is the hard day.
It isn’t a course and it isn’t a test. It’s five days of practicing something all the training at the Haden Institute is built on.
✦ As You Go …
We began this issue with a story about climbing down into the dark to listen. Here’s the full album that Oliveros released after the journey.