Good Questions Are a Kind of Salvation
On learning how to listen for deep story
Photo by DaYsO on Unsplash “Have you ever stood in the presence of a tree and listened to the wind pass through its leaves? The roots and body stand defiant and unmoved. But listen. The branches stretch out their tongues and whisper shhhhh.”
This is Cole Arthur Riley’s favorite sound, and the opening of her first book, This Here Flesh. The life of this book begins long before these words, in Riley’s commitment to (re)learning how to listen — to the trees, to the voices around us, to the stories her family carries. In this piece, Riley reflects on the questions she crafted to welcome those deep stories into a world where story itself has become a mere