Stop. Look. Listen.
It may be the best advice for crossing the road, but Stop Look Listen is surely also a mantra for living a life full of curiosity and awareness. And it’s surprising perhaps – given what nature fanatics many of us are in Felbeck Trust – that stopping, looking, and listening is something we still need to be reminded to do, so busy are we, ‘getting things done’. Super-tramp and poet W.H. Davies knew this when he wrote his most famous poem, Leisure. Immersing ourselves in nature, and consciously opening our minds and senses to what is around us, is one of the most therapeutic things we can do.
What an absolute treat it was to take this immersion several steps beyond anything most of us had experienced before, and accompany Martin Scaiff of HomeSounds on a sound walk around our Sustead sites. Wearing silent-disco headphones, connected wirelessly to Martin’s microphones, we were encouraged to relax our hearing, quiet our minds, and tune in to the mysterious soundscape of microscopic noises coming from under the ground and from under water. Martin categorises the sounds he listens for under three headings: anthrophony (the sounds made by humans, which, you quickly realise, is the vast majority of all noise generated anywhere); biophony (sounds from all other living organisms); and geophony (sounds made by the fabric of our planet).
Felbeck Trust volunteers can be a chatty bunch, but there was a deep satisfaction to be found in the collective commitment of our group to cease making noise ourselves. Even children with restless energy who find it challenging to concentrate have been drawn by sound walks into the extraordinary soundscape hidden all around us, and have found stillness and focus through them. And my goodness, once you start being quiet deliberately, it’s impossible not to start questioning the value of most of your utterances! Quite mind blowing too, to understand the vastness of the sound landscape out there, of which humans generally experience only a fraction. It was like being introduced to another dimension, right there under our noses if only we stop, look, and listen for it.
