The pandemic spread quickly across the small state of Rhode Island. After three weeks in my tiny apartment I resolved to drive home to Canada to wait it out amongst the lakes and the trees. When I arrived in early April there was three feet of snow, a frozen lake and a cord of chopped wood for the fire. It was quiet, cold and off course. One month later the snow had cleared. I watched the ice on the lake slowly melt, then come back, then melt again until the entire body of water was freed from it’s winter shackles. Buds became visible on bare trees and almost overnight the birds returned. I first started hearing them in the wee hours of the morning. The blackcapped chickadee calling out chickadee-dee-dee-dee through the leafless trees. The Eastern Wood-Pewee slurs a cheerful pee-a-wee from a young maple beside the deck. Each morning I would be engulfed in the developing cacophony of spring. I spent hours sitting in the cold with my eyes closed and my ears open. It can take decades to learn to identify birds based on their calls. Some lifelong birders never reach the point of confident auditory identification.

I clattered around the hall cupboard filled with heavy coats. Behind a box with flashlights and screwdrivers I found my grandfather's old field glasses. The case was tattered and the strap long gone, but the binoculars afforded me a new level of observation, a way to connect with the physicality of the sounds that had been holding me all spring. I ordered a book on Ontario birds and slowly began to connect the sights and sounds to knowledge. Robins and crows, kinglets and wrens, I was grateful for their company. I watch the female loon float around the bay with a baby chick on her back. Occasionally her baby would slide on to the water's surface as she dove into the depths in search of minnows for breakfast. Loons sleep with their necks tucked in, drifting about with the currents and the wind.  When I come too close in my canoe, she belts out a tremolo call, warning her partner of my presence. We are all talking to each other even if we don’t speak the same language. Nearly a year later the birds are returning to my backyard in East Providence. My ears have been tuned to perk up at the sound of a squawking jay or the hammering of the woodpecker I haven’t been able to glimpse. I can’t always see them, but I am listening so I know they are there.

Listening is a practice because it takes deliberate work. Our ability to multitask within our own minds is truly extraordinary but not necessarily beneficial. Listening, like meditation, requires you to be present. I can watch television, work on ceramics and simultaneously have a conversation with my roommate, but should I? What was that thing she mentioned? Did I remember to score and slip that section? What just happened? Okay now I have to rewind. To offer one's full attention at all times is impossible as modernity has not afforded us more leisure time but rather more distractions. Developing a practice of listening is to narrow one's focus in a world that requires us to be working on five things at once. From the birds in my backyard, to the many voices I spoke with for this project, I have been exercising my ability to listen and cultivate knowledge. As designers, we are often positioned as experts of our field. A practice of listening acknowledges everyone’s expertise based on their own lived experience. 

When I arrived at RISD in the fall of 2019, listening was not my strong suit. My professors admonished me for pressing forward too quickly, not really doing the design work, not listening to the feedback I was given. “You need to enjoy the process more. Slow down. Do the work”. I was impatient. I wanted to develop new ways of thinking but remained rigid in my approach. To ensure I would make beautiful designed objects, I would stay firmly within my lane. 

Something fundamentally shifted after my summer alone with the birds and the whispering pines. I didn’t have a lane anymore, at least not one that I recognized and I could not separate myself from this practice that had carried me through the summer. By listening to everything around me my perspective shifted organically. When I returned to Providence, I noted the sound of the river from my apartment, plastic bags and leaves smushed along chain link fences, masks strewn across public walkways and heaping piles of garbage along the train tracks. 

My capacity for listening was expanding to my other senses where seeing and feeling became a form of listening. On the first day of classes I walked by the big blue bin outside the sculpture foundry. I had passed this bin everyday the year before and had never given it a second thought. This time, when I approached it, the sun was casting its last rays of the day on the alleyway behind our studios before dipping behind the Metcalf Building. It was as if the container was glowing, light refracting off misshapen and abandoned projects. The bin was signaling to me, drawing me toward the limitless possibilities within it. I put on my welding gloves and began dragging out rusted metal scraps, contorted, some haphazardly fused together. I found a wide piece of steel tubing, some rebar and some steel rod a student had bent into a squiggly shape. I took these items to the mig welder and made my first piece of the year. It was a chair, it was sittable and it was like nothing I had ever made before. 

I was actively unlearning while simultaneously knowing more. The materials were speaking to me, telling me how they should be processed and shaped. It was as if they had always been trying to talk to me but in a frequency I could not hear. Suddenly, I heard everything. I could recognize my lane again and it was going in a completely new direction. I decided that day I wouldn't go to the store anymore. There was nothing I needed that I couldn't find in my surroundings. Undervalued items everywhere. Pure potential tossed in the ditch while thinking, this trash is someone else's problem. Maybe it could be my problem. I could create second chances and see value all around me. All I had to do was listen.