Can You Hear Me Major Tom?

All week long I've been hearing about hearing, and about listening so you can hear. A deeper listening that scares me. 

It started with my intuitive friend Charline telling me how she connects with spirit. By being still. 

Then, on Monday I find this video making the rounds on Facebook. I find the line "Can you hear me Major Tom?" from David Bowie's Space Oddity so poignant it makes me pause every time I hear it. For imagine, not being connected to something, or someone. 

ISS Commander Chris Hadfield's angelic version of Space Oddity. *

Because isn't connection everything? Brené Brown's words on authenticity have made me open up in ways I can't even fathom.

Just yesterday I read a blog posting by another of my heroines, Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts, who is starting the "I See You" movement:

See Susan Cain's Blog 

And now this latest message about hearing that was just brought to my attention today. It made me realize what a gift it is to give myself the ability to filter the things I hear — the birds singing, the wind rustling through the trees, the sound of waves lapping at the shore — and truly hear them. All these things that make me feel one with the universe and an infinite peace.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better.

These are just some of the too many signs that I have been given this week that I need to start listening to. For the Voice is speaking to me. Now that I see these signs, I get it, but can I do it? I've been very successfully avoiding listening all week. TV is the best way to keep my mind in "I'm too busy to listen" mode. Or eating... something that has been screeching at me since I proudly boasted I had overcome my need to emotional eat. Hah! Take that ego!

So, just what am I afraid of anyway? It started with a little niggle of a voice recently when another friend asked me at my birthday dinner if the deep changes I've been experiencing — my deepening spiritual awareness, my rebranding, calling myself a storyteller, being authentically me — will mean a change as well in what I write? I felt that quickening in my gut (or more aptly put, like my gut was pushed up into my solar plexus and then dropped into my belly that happens when the Voice wants me to listen) as I ignored it and  glibly answered, "No. I think I will be doing more book editing for others, but I still enjoy promotional writing."

Do I really still have a connection to promotional writing? If I really listen to my Self, it's not the connection it used to be. Now what excites me is helping other spirit-based businesses thrive and succeed.

I also have a confession to make — something I don't think I mentioned in my last blog — I feel it is time to tell my own story. Oh my, just writing those words closed my throat with emotion!

What if all this change has been leading me to this realization? At 10 years old I stopped being a story writer when my mother didn't believe I had written a story my teacher thought was so good. When I got my first job in advertising, I felt as though I'd found my place because I was able to help tell the stories of other people and businesses.

So, is this why I've had at least five people ask me to help them to edit and write their life stories in the past six months? So that I will be ready to write my own? Is that why I changed my branding? Is this why I am now a storyteller rather than a copywriter?

I originally thought changing to my name removed the limitations that my former company name imposed on me, but has it all been leading up to this stunning realization?

I am actually asking these questions because all this is coming to me as I pull together all the things that happened to me this week and write this blog.

And it's leading to all kinds of unknowns and incredibly scary scenarios. If I've been struggling as a copywriter for the past year, how the bleeping hell am I going to survive as a writer?!

But then, as I forced myself to sit down and try again to read this amazing new book I've been avoiding all week, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen by Mark Nepo I saw this, and it spoke to me:

"No one can teach us how to intuitively listen or trust, but the quiet courage to say yes rather than no is close to each of us. It involves holding our opinions and identity lightly so we can be touched by the future. It means loosening our fist-like hold on how we see the world, so that other views can reach us, expand us, deepen us, and rearrange us. Saying yes is the bravest way to keep leaning into life."

Holy cannoli!

"I couldn't know that listening to that uneasiness and following it would awaken my next phase of authenticity, in which I would shed my lifelong need to explain myself. I could simply be myself."

Holy crap, really?! Can it be?!

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* I have to say as a Canadian, hearing Chris Hadfield's choir boy voice singing this hauntingly beautiful song — and all of the songs, and conversations he shared while orbiting our planet — makes me eminently proud.