2.3 Before Teaching Listening to the SONG of Life: Two Decades of Planting Seeds

Two stories, from pre- and post-tenure time periods, illustrate how “planting seeds“ eventually sprouted into the Listening to the SONG of Life course.

Pre-tenure, I found myself navigating winding mountainous roadways from the driver’s seat of a 1976 Chevy Nova. With navigational assistance from my partner, we found our campsite among the sweet-smelling woodlands of pine, oak, and maple. Looking across the campsite at my partner’s growing abdomen, I felt grateful for the new life growing within her as I reflected on my inner growth. One book I read on that campout significantly nurtured my inner growth, The Mantram Handbook.^[1]

I began reflectively reading about mantram prayer for the first time. Little did I know how this simple prayer would help me listen to, and cope with, the stresses of tenure, fatherhood, intimate relationships, and illness through the next two decades. I imagine the mantram seed planted as an acorn on that campout. I visualize the tree now, inside of me, like the child was inside my partner, well rooted, steadily growing, maturing into something mysterious that eventually lead me to birthing and teaching the Listening to the SONG of Life course.

Moving from the pre-tenure years to my immediate post-tenure year, another significant seed was planted on a Sunday afternoon after a religious service. A wise elder in my community announced a video showing after the service about a local retreat center. The last retreat I attended was in my late teens. Intrigued by the possibility of exploring my adult spirituality on retreat, after the service, I watched a fuzzy video tape play for five minutes on a small television screen set atop a mobile cart near the corner of an otherwise unoccupied room. There was me, the elder, and the video. No one else in the community of over two hundred people answered the invitation. The video describes The Well Retreat Center^[2] located on ten acres beside a small lake in Isle of Wright County in the state of Virginia.

Over time I would discover more riches in nature at the Well Retreat Center than the video could portray. Visually, the landscape of the retreat center is stunning.^[3] Additionally, the video provided a glimpse inside the hermitages that I would eventually call home while on retreat. Rough wooden walls surround a bed, chair and table, and bathroom–austere but adequate. The main retreat center contains offices, meeting rooms, a cafeteria, a library of religious-spiritual books and tapes, and a small chapel. Inside the chapel, a brightly colored stained-glass mural of the retreat center rests against one wall opposite three chairs. In the center stands an oak-colored wooden altar with a white candle atop. I made it a ritual to visit the chapel at the beginning and end of each retreat. During my retreat years, the Well Retreat Center, especially the library, chapel, and natural setting, became a quiet oasis of refreshment for me where I listened to the SONG of life.

The seed, in the unusual form of a community elder showing a five-minute video of a retreat center, led to me journeying on solo and group retreats at The Well Retreat Center over thirty times in the next twenty years.^[4] Over the course of these years, through listening in silence and meditation at the retreat center and at home, all of life, especially nature, began to speak to me in a new way.

Other seeds planted at the retreat center sprouted and eventually produced fruit in the form of academic research and publications. As an illustration, on one retreat, well past midnight in the private library, I discovered books about prayer. My reflection and meditation on these books led to a new line of academic research on prayer that sustained me for over twenty years.^[5] I envision my retreats as nourishing a “tree of life” with different kinds of fruit on the branches—some love fruit is for family, other fruit is for academics, and one particular kind of fruit, perhaps a pomegranate with many ruby red seeds, developed into the course I call Listening to the SONG of Life.

These two stories, the pre-tenure mantram story and the post-tenure retreat story, mark a twenty-year period of spiritual renewal, resulting in many changes in my personal and professional lives.^[6] Looking back over the last twenty years since that post-tenure transition period, I view listening to the SONG of life as a gestalt, with different figures of the SONG standing against the foreground of life. I came to a deeper understanding of myself (self in the SONG) by listening to my feelings, needs, and experiences through a special kind of journaling.^[7]

My connection with nature was further revitalized a decade ago when I began creating an edible food forest. This type of garden models the structure and function of natural forests for the purpose of providing humans with food, herbs, fodder for animals, and so forth.^[8] I also started climbing trees and digging holes again–my two favorite non-academic activities as a young boy growing up in Sunnyvale, California. With the help of gardener-permaculture-food forest teachers,^[9] I found a new appreciation of, and connection with, trees, the earth, and the wonders of nature (“N” in SONG). Lastly, the growth in my personal prayer and meditation life with the Divine (“G” in SONG) translated into a professional passion for prayer research.^[10] When I finally decided to teach the listening class, these four contexts of my life converged into a gestalt that I dubbed “listening to the SONG of life.” This two-decade gestation period finally gave birth to the organizing framework and foundation for the Listening to the SONG of Life course.