European School of Governance, Poem #240527 by Louise McCulloch
Keywords: trust, communication, understanding, being heard, listening, meaning, voice, compassion, power, metamodernism
Custodian of Trust Seeds
“Not yet” you say as I sense your tentative discernment,
Is it a privilege to utter those words and be heard?
To be heard,
Not just listened to, but heard,
For the words to be noticed and have meaning.
I said them and others before, “not yet”, “no”, ” I don’t want to”,
Sharing my hesitation and need to slow down,
Not here but there,
I guess they must have sounded different though when I spoke them,
Merely noise that faded into the background.
I don’t fully trust them now, the words,
I thought they were free for me in language,
But repeated experiences taught me otherwise,
I realised that language has constraints that are not always initially apparent,
Language, a supposed agreement between us about meaning,
But you get to decide what you hear, if anything,
What or whose meaning is present, if any,
Or whether you merely hear noise that fades into the background unimportant.
So here I am today often silent in my transparent veil of silenced,
With my invisible antennae detecting whether this is the kind of space where there is possibility…
for words to have meaning,
for us to listen and hear together,
for us to nurture our understanding,
for us to care and learn with each other’s experiences,
for us to embrace each other with soft tenderness.
I hold my trust seeds with a tight grip,
Until I can sense if the conditions might be right,
Maybe dispersing one or two to see what happens,
I am a Custodian of Trust Seeds you know,
I have learned a lot about tending their conditions,
Perhaps you are a Custodian of Trust Seeds too?
Perhaps there are different varieties?
Perhaps we could grow an understanding together?
