Listening At Juniper Place

Hello from Juniper Place.

We would like to say thank you to everyone for making last weeks Pro Day so wonderful and engaging. At Juniper Place, we are excited to be thinking with Listening this year. Listening is entangled in all that we do and has been particularly important to us over the past couple of months as we adjust to a new year, new energies, and new ways of being at Juniper Place. We would like to offer a few of the questions, thoughts and ideas that we are starting out with:

We have been thinking deeply about what it means to slow down, to be present, and to Listen.

We are a community and we believe we must seek connection, have an openness to truly  know one another (more-than-human and human) and listen with our whole self.

Listening at Juniper Place is grounded in acts of feeling.

We are asking out selves:

What engagements, connections, experiences, and ways of being in the world do we open ourselves to when we expand our conceptualization of listening beyond the simple act of hearing?

• How do we listen to each other, respecting each others knowledge, experiences and ways of being in the world beyond what is simply audible?
• How can we get to know and feel one another?
• How do we listen with the more-than-human world?

We are also considering what is needed to foster an environment of Listening:

• Willingness to reconsider what we ‘know’
• Openness and self reflection
• Curiosity
• Desire to connect
• Paying Attention
• feeling/empathy

A few thoughts we are thinking with…

Dame Evelyn Glennie (2024),

“Listening is the glue to humanity…[It’s] the thing that creates a bridge between one person and another, whether that is the spoken word, the written word, or whether there are no words, it’s that presence. And so we always think that in order to listen, it has to come from a sound, so we must hear something. But actually listening, really, is about paying attention. It is about literally being in that present moment.  .“ (Dame Evelyn Glennie, 2024)

Carla Rinaldi (2001) presents a definition of the term Listening:

“Listening as sensitivity to the patterns that connect, to that which connects us to others; abandoning ourselves to the conviction that our understanding and our own being are but small parts of a broader, integrated knowledge that holds the universe together.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)

“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”

Thanks for reading! We look forward to exchanging ideas as the year unfolds.

Juniper Place