Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.
What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.
