What may be a possible notebook for listening?

What kind of relationships may exist between listening, writing and a notebook?

A Possible Notebook 

for Listening

(An introduction/conceptualization?)

This is a notebook conceptualized as a tool or object enabling and encouraging you to listen. Or perhaps simply caring for and nurturing your already existing listening capacities. It is intended as a gentle gesture; something to keep you company while listening, or as someone interested in your thoughts of and experiences with listening.

 

In many ways this is just a standard and banal notebook. By inserting this little note and giving it a perhaps pretentious title, we hope that the intentions of it and possible enabling abilities can be those of and for listening.

To listen with and through writing

 

This is a notebook. It offers space for and invites you to share your words.

As a notebook it attempts, to the best of its ability, to listen sincerely to you.

We may think of and engage in writing as a way to delve deeper into our own thinking, emotions, and experiences. Writing can be a way to hold onto important information, to appreciate words and voices we have heard, thought we heard, and wanted to hear. Writing can be a way to make the implicit more explicit; to challenge and revisit the assumed; to give the silent knowledge a poetic and written language. It can also be a way of letting go; to allow the written words to carry and cherish what our bodyminds find difficult to stay-with and hold on to alone.

Writing can be a generative practice. We may expand our thinking and understanding through writing, and thereby making space for becoming thoughts. Writing as a way to reflect and go deeper into our own understandings of our processes may require room for concentration. It may require curiosity, openness, and care. With reflective writing in this hopefully gentle notebook, you can – protected from critical views and opposing voices – map your thoughts, see new perspectives, get a view of your own assumptions, and explore the processes you are (always already unescapably) entangled with. With this notebook you may listen to your listening.

This way of writing may not have an audience. Writing in this notebook can be seen as you having a dialogue with yourself, witnessed only by the notebook.

While we listen to ourselves through writing, we may also wonder upon how a notebook can become a partner, a listening allied, and generous supporter – how it offers us a safe space, and time to be with our thoughts and experiences. We may wonder upon, how the notebook might be listening back towards us, witnessing us, helping us to hold space for our listening.

Writing on these pages may also be in the form of drawing, ripping, or burning pages, throwing, or giving it away. It all depends on your own listening.

This notebook as a listening partner may be an attentive, patient, and curious partner.

Primarily a thought; listening, writing, notebook... but also a concept, a possible object and practice… and now also 25 paperback copies for different events and tests (printed spring 2024).