Learning to Listen

By Hannah Bennett & Sophia Nickolas
November 4, 2024

I’ll let you in on a secret, but we have to whisper it: magic is real, and it falls from the sky. Headlamps beam upward, illuminating glitter floating in the dark, not stars this time but snowflakes. Its superpower is silence, blanketing the world and its beings in a peaceful embrace. If you listen, the snow will sing to you, just not in words or lyrics.

Every day at Arcadia is a journey in learning to listen—to each other, to the space we inhabit, and to the harmonies that those relationships create.

One of our weekly assignments for program director Jacob McCoola’s class, Knowing Nature, is to sit in the woods for an hour and practice exactly that—the art of listening. Creating space for quiet reflection and appreciation has been incredibly valuable in getting to know ourselves and this place, in addition to being an opportunity to hear things that we normally wouldn’t.

“One morning I was doing my sit spot and I heard a bald eagle’s wings. That was pretty cool,” Arcadian Callie Garnett reflects in class. Turns out, two other Arcadians not only saw the same eagle on their sit spots but also noted the sound of wind against its feathers. When your physical and psychological being is at rest, you adjust to your surroundings and your surroundings adjust to you, allowing for profound experiences in both perception and interaction.

Arcadian Keegan Leboffe visits the same spot for all of his sit spots. He describes a typical experience: “Usually after twenty minutes the birds adjust to me being there, and one time a bird came up to me and it was the same species as the one I embroidered on my pants this summer!” Sitting quietly allowed for this magical parallel.

Sit spotting is not only a form of active listening, but also of noticing. This practice has grown out of the classroom and into moments in our daily lives as well. Roy remembers a moment on a walk to Pontiac Point with Riley earlier this week: “We were stomping around the woods chit-chatting, and we looked around and noticed at least forty chickadees cheeping and dancing.” The pair realized that the birds were probably reacting to their presence, so they sat down and became quiet to see what would happen. Soon enough, loud chirps turned into quiet ones and the chickadees fluttered into the trees.

The end of Jake’s class last Friday marked the beginning of an experience where we would be able to apply our sit-spot skills along with other outdoor knowledge acquired during the semester. Each of us embarked on an adventure of our own, spending the weekend at various campsites on the Massawepie property…solo. But we were not really alone, as we are always in the company of other beings who live here with us: the bald eagle, the bird embroidered on Keegan’s pants, the chickadees, and whatever mythical horror movie creatures our imaginations cooked up when left alone with our thoughts for the night. A common agreement among the group is that being alone in the day feels much different when the sun goes down. There is much to be heard in the quiet, and when our sight is impaired due to darkness, we are left to rely more heavily on our sense of hearing to decipher information about what is going on around us.

Both Clara and Riley experienced mysterious “splashing and scurrying” noises at night. But it wasn’t the splashing and scurrying that was scary; it was the mystery. Riley said that once he figured out that the sound was just a friendly beaver, “the sound lost its association to the feeling of fear.” I still believe it’s a mermaid, but that’s beside the point.

Inversely, the sounds we create can startle the very creatures that startle us. “The biggest sounds I heard on [my] solo was when I spooked grouses and they would rustle around and flap away,” says Roy.

On solos, there was certainly space for fear, but also space for self-trust and growth. Arcadian Rachel Pelletier describes a FIRE example of this: “Being able to start the fire on my own was very special because it signified all the skills I acquired throughout the semester being put to use, and it reinforced feelings of independence.” Fire building also requires listening, as Rachel adds: “As I was making the fire, I was thinking about how you [Hannah] told me the key is listening to what the fire is telling you it wants: like a breath of air or shifting around the sticks.” Thus, listening goes beyond hearing, asking you to interpret sound along with visual, tactile, and even emotional perception.

“It becomes very apparent when people are not listening to themselves, to others, and to the landscape around them,” says assistant director Eva Wetzel. The importance of listening is clear at our weekly community meetings where we discuss as a group how we can improve and maintain a cohesive living space. To encourage effective communication, we pass around a talking bear named Blueberry. This way each person gets the opportunity to speak and be heard, avoiding the all-too-common trend of sound becoming noise. Although there is beauty in overlapping voices, passing the bear makes room for individual voices by maintaining a quiet environment.

We often discuss the importance of listening to understand and then respond rather than listening to react. Director Jacob McCoola compares an effective group discussion to a good jazz song: “Every instrument has a different sound, and together they make a beautiful composition.” Community meeting is a jazz song. We all have different voices, and as individuals we form completely different sounds, but when we take time to appreciate each other’s perspectives, our voices become instruments—they are trumpets and pianos in our favorite jazz songs.

Intention with our voices is a constant effort. This includes respecting our nightly quiet hours. Every weeknight from 9:30pm until breakfast at 7:15am, we have quiet hours. This agreement allows Arcadians to sleep or enjoy silence in whatever form they desire while others converse at a low volume. We are a rowdy crew, but every night we gentle our voices because, as Arcadian Riley Gale says, “This is a place for both the very loud and the very quiet.”

The very loud and the very quiet applies to all Arcadian creatures—both the human and the nonhuman—and listening to these creatures opens a window into communities within our own. Lowering our voices helps us hear the birds singing to each other and the trees whispering their wisdom.

We can also hear the planes flying overhead, reminding us that there is a world of people outside our oasis, and we are connected to it, at least temporarily, through the engines’ vibration. We sometimes forget the impact of our sound, but when we hear planes, we are confronted with our own effect on the environment, making us more intentional with how we carry ourselves in this world. We aspire to be loud enough to sing and quiet enough so the birds sing too.