A world of exquisite beauty and expansive awareness awaits if only we open up our ears and listen with our ‘Third Ear’ for greater connection, understanding and love of all beings. Elizabeth Rosner is a vivid and artful weaver of liminal worlds of quietude and sound.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Spirituality, self-love, self-awareness, psychology, history
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Review in one word: Pianissimo
Welcome into a liminal state of wonder and fascination courtesy of our aural sense of conscious awareness and deep listening. This is a love ballad about how deep listening and sensing the world opens up a lotus flower of infinite understanding with other living creatures: plant and animal non-human beings.
I had never heard of Elizabeth Rosner before this but I am delighted to “meet” her through this wonderful, far-reaching book that takes in philosophy, natural history, eastern spirituality, animal behaviour and animal intelligence and much more
Rosner really stretches ideas of what connection, togetherness and other-than-human intelligence means. She does this in a poetic, lyrical and expansive way that instils a sense of awe in the natural world. This is one to dive deeply into and come up for air feeling completely invigorated, like free-diving into a coral reef.
She is a vivid and artful weaver of liminal worlds of quietude and sound. I am mesmerised by her words and will try and find her other books. Rosner’s other works include: Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory and the novel Electric City, named a best book by NPR.
The Third Ear
“Consider the phrase “pregnant pause.” Third-ear listening can be a fertile place, whether we are communicating wordlessly with our eyes or absorbing whispers from across a room or a continent. Perhaps the cultivated and often sacred silences that float inside a therapist’s office are not so different from those expectant spaces within our own bodies—filled with potential and possibility.
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
“Your two ears can take in only so much,” writes James E. Miller in The Art of Listening in a Healing Way. “They can be attuned only to certain wavelengths. After that, your third ear may be the one that hears best.
The entire universe is sonic
“When elephants respond to news from their miles-distant family members, details they’ve taken in through acoustic sensitivities in their feet. When the searching roots of trees grow toward the energetic flow of water, sometimes tangling themselves in underground pipes—isn’t that too a kind of listening? What about when hummingbirds return to the specific vibration of nectar-drenched flowers? When whales share songs across oceans and recognize the pauses made by one another’s breathing? Hushed or amplified, implausible yet audible, everything is humming—from quantum to cosmic, from the inner life of electrons to the membranes of outer space. The entire universe is sonic.”
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
John Cage and Deep Listening
“John Cage’s premiere of his composition 4’33” (four minutes, thirty-three seconds) occurred on August 29, 1952, in Woodstock, New York. An article about Cage’s premiere describes it this way:
“Unlike compositions designed to make the outside world fall away, here was a music that, when it engaged you, made the present world open up like a lotus blossoming in stop-motion photography.”
“Terry Tempest Williams writes about that 1952 concert too: “In times of war, survival depends on listening to that suffering. Cage understood how the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.”11 Cage himself once said, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
“ As David George Haskell reminds us, in his book Sounds Wild and Broken: “At any place on Earth, thousands of parallel sensory worlds coexist, the diverse productions of evolution’s creative hand. We cannot hear with the ears of others, but we can listen and wonder. And beyond that state of wonder, many argue, lies a state far more collectively hopeful—not only for humans but for all beings”
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
Content Catnip 