Waiting is a deep acceptance of the moment as such, even when we are actively practicing meditative inquiry. Part of Son [Korean Zen] involves asking, “What is this?” of our experience, but without any interest in an answer. We’re not waiting for something, we’re just waiting. We realize that our longing for an answer undermines the authenticity of the questioning itself. Can we be satisfied just to rest in this questioning, but in a deeply focused and embodied way? Can we wait without any expectations?

Going hand in hand with this waiting is also a quality of listening. Rather than just listening more attentively to the crows in the trees, the noises in the room, or the quiet hush of silence, think of listening as a metaphor for meditation…

With listening, rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound “out there,” you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. The internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction. That’s a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something.

Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle Magazine March 2020

Listening has become a favourite metaphor for me, too; though it’s more than a metaphor, really. To be aware of sound in meditation, as with physical sensation, is an opening of oneself to what is coming to be, quite simply. There is no anxious reaching for understanding, nor any attempt to impose any kind of religious or psychological interpretation on what is perceived.

Listening, though, is also an inward discipline – an openness to quiet inklings that otherwise are drowned out by the usual internal chatter. It begins, sometimes, with an unsought willingness to hear the call to the contemplative life in the first place:

To know such a call is to feel its insistence. Having felt it, one can hide by running to distractions of one kind or another, but whenever there is a pause in the business of life, it is there awaiting our response. This call is the greatest blessing imaginable, and it sometimes feels like torture. Even though it makes so many demands, we would be bereft without it.

Daishin Morgan, Buddha Recognizes Buddha

But like so many things in this life, it is never simply a stage we pass through. The call is ever present, always renewed. It is always the same; and different, sometimes radically different, each time. If we are listening, we will find ourselves called deeper into the wilderness, away from the well-trodden places we may have become used to. For me, it has, as I said yesterday, led increasingly to quiet, and away from organised religion altogether.

Listening has become a listening for the silence that underlies audible sounds, beneath the birdsong and the distant clatter of the Bristol train, beneath the background hush of the breeze in the leaves. The silence holds the sound, infinitely precious and detailed, as the open ground itself holds all that comes to be, all its loveliness and horror, all its endless opportunities for being loved.