It’s All Just Listening

eric mccarty
2 min readJun 6, 2022
It’s All Just Listening — Headless Now — Prose Poem — Moca McCarty Photo

It’s all just listening:

meditation, writing, the two seem rather seamless to me now, and most especially the early morning session, before even a hint of first light, an easy rise from bed to mat where my mantra will lead me to a deeper silence than even sleep just held. It’s through this continued silence that words will then appear, almost drifting to me in their soft arrival, my meditation now is at my desk, artfully arranging each word gifted to my quiet mind. These are no longer separate acts, meditation and my writing, really, it’s all just listening, attentive to mantra, the effortless appearance of words, and the silence found throughout.

it’s all just listening.

the art of mantra is to simply listen to however it plays through the mind, its agenda is to point towards a natural silent world, already existing and only waiting to be revealed. There is no effort given here, no sense of need for the mantra to be controlled in anyway. It’s a thought, a faint impression that’s more vibration than a string of separate words.

writing too is just listening, although it seems I play a more active role — but the truth is that there is no search for words, no attempt to actually be a writer. Words appear, and before they do I sit with silence, more than content to simply be present. It’s a joyful listening of an inner world full of pure potentiality, the primordial ground where words eventually arrive, always and easily completely of their own accord.

only then will there be writing.

and that’s my early morning, a moment full of silence and whatever sounds that it may hold, seamless. Meditation, writing, they’re similar to the point of being one expression, unique in method, and yet the end result is much the same…

it’s all just listening….

and through this silence my world arises.

~

Peace, Eric

eric mccarty

Writer, prose poetry, meditation teacher and lifetime student