When you arrive for the Stanley King Counseling Institute at the Brooks School in North Andover, MA in June, you have no idea where you’re going. There’s no signage and no one to greet you or direct you. It’s raining, and the campus is so vast that when you finally do find the library, you’re soaked.

Exploring

The next day, the sun comes out and you see so much natural beauty and such vastness of natural space that you gasp audibly. As the days go by, you take every chance you get to go for a walk. Maybe the goal is just to see if there’s any way to identify the boundary between where the campus ends and where something else begins. You never find the boundary.

⬅ One particular day, you find a pond with ducks in it. You experiment with the panorama setting on your phone camera. 

One night, the moon is so full, and the sky is as deeply blue as it ever has been, and the clouds are alive and glowing. It’s not possible to capture the splendor of this night in pictures.

Chapel

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One day, you find the campus chapel. It’s an Episcopal chapel, it’s early morning, and no one is there. So you go on a self-guided tour and have your own fabulously customized private church service in the sanctuary, complete with singing, dancing, prayer, and a postlude.

And you have the best time, and you feel fully alive and grateful for every single blessing. You find some woods, so you pray and give thanks there, too.

Portsmouth

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After some particularly lovely and brutally exhausting sessions at the institute, you go on an excursion to Portsmouth with your new friends and colleagues.

There, you drink the local IPA and buy lobster pants which you promptly put on when you get back to your room.

Boston

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There’s a talent show, some tearful goodbyes, and promises to keep in touch. Then once you’re shuttled away from the campus, you wisely arrange to spend an extra night in Boston so you can catch your breath before the long flight home. 

And you have absolutely no regrets. Never having been there before, you decide you adore this city, but you can’t bring yourself to spend $22.00 on a hot buttered lobster roll.

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So it’s off to the bar at Ned Devine’s for a couple of spicy pineapple margaritas and a steak and cheese sandwich that doesn’t disappoint.

Three lessons learned about deep listening

1. We can’t listen deeply if we don’t check our own agenda at the door.
    
2. There is SO MUCH never-ending work to be done, in order to listen and understand who we are and how much we need each other. And this work is the hardest, most vulnerable work we can possibly do.
    
3. When we get it right, the world and all its people become so precious. Our faith, hope, and love deepen. And our gratitude is overwhelming.