THE BIG WELCOME for Applied Ecological Listening

An adapted version of Kate Morales’ offered in Slow Spatial Reader – Chronicles of Radical Affect (Ed. Carolyn F. Strauss), written for and read at the occasion of the Applied Ecological Listening series, hosted by Center for Applied Ecological Thinking, facilitated by Bureau for Listening, as part of the manifestation of The Listening Biennial 3rd edition in Copenhagen.

We are so deeply honored to welcome you here — into this space, into this moment, into this shared spiral of listening.

Take a breath.
Take a pause.
Allow yourself to arrive.

Feel the ground beneath you — the land that holds you.
Feel the air moving in and out of your body — the living exchange between you and the trees, the waters, the unseen worlds around us.
Feel your heartbeat — your sounding and responsive body, and how it calibrates with its surroundings.

Let the dust in your mind settle. 

Let your attention return to your body, your breath, and this present moment.

You have arrived.

Welcome.

We welcome your curiosity and your confusion.
We welcome your open-hearted wonder and your critical questions.
We welcome your clear intentions and your unresolved uncertainties.

We welcome your listening body — the part of you that receives, notices, attends — and your voicing body — the part that names, wonders, responds.

You are welcome here.

Your culture is welcome. Your ethnic origin is welcome.
Your race, your accent, your skin, your food preferences, your ancestral stories — all the complexities that make up your cultural identity are welcome here.

We welcome the long, interwoven histories and herstories you bring — the stories of migration, survival, ceremony, resistance, and transformation. We honor your ancestors and the more-than-human kin who brought you into being.

We welcome you — and the networks of life you carry within and around you.
The children in your life, your parents and elders, your kin and chosen family, the animals in your life, as well as the forests, rocks, rivers, fields and oceans you are connected to — all these threads are welcome here.

We welcome your spiritual practice, religious affiliation, the path you walk  — whether named, unnamed, wandering, or rooted. However you hold this aspect of your life is welcome.

 

Your love is welcome here. How you love, who you love, and your understanding of what love is — in all of love’s forms, identities, expressions, and evolutions –– are all welcome. 

We welcome your questions about belonging, and your unfolding relationships with gender, sexuality, and self. How you have evolved and are evolving are welcome.

We welcome your grief. We welcome your joy. We welcome your guilt and your longing, your tenderness and your resilience.

We welcome the parts of you that are confident and the parts that are unsure.
We welcome your wounds and your scars, your privileges and your vulnerabilities, your becoming and your unbecoming.

You are welcome here.

We welcome you as learners and teachers, as listeners.
We welcome you as activists, artists, scientists, healers, caretakers, skeptics, dreamers, poets, witches, and wanderers.

 

We welcome you at whatever level of wellness or exhaustion you arrive with.
We welcome your introversion, your extroversion, your ambivalence.
We welcome the full arc of your journey — every moment, every detour, every survival that brought you here.

We welcome you in all the ways you are learning to unlearn.
We welcome you whatever level at which you are currently decolonizing your mind, body, and relations. We welcome you wherever you are in divesting from different intersecting forms of oppression, extractive economies, and other interlocking forms of harm.
We welcome you as you reorient towards interdependence, reciprocity, and collective care.

You are welcome here.

And as we gather, we pause to offer gratitude:
We give thanks to the ecosystems — seen and unseen — that hold us in life, thought, and breath.

You are welcome here and we give thanks.

We thank you for being here, for making it here, for offering your time, attention and affections. We give thanks for what you bring in the way you bring it. We give thanks for both the said and the unsaid, to the knowledge shared, and the caring for the unknown. We give thanks to which enable us to enable others.

Thank you.

Settle in.

Welcome.