Field Note No. 2: Little DeAn'Na Uncovers the Buried City Within

As far back as I can remember, I have been listening to the world in a way I didn't know how to explain.

For most of my life, I didn't have words for it. I assumed everyone experienced the world this way, and it wasn't until much later that I realized many people were surprised by the things I naturally noticed.

It has never felt like trying harder.

It feels more like listening farther.

When someone is speaking, I hear their words, but I also find myself listening into the spaces around them. I notice what arrives in a pause, what repeats itself without intending to, what quietly gathers beneath a conversation. The same thing happens when I'm walking through a forest, watching the sky before a storm, sitting beside the ocean, or creating with my hands. Something in me has always reached beyond what is immediately visible, waiting patiently for relationships to reveal themselves.

Years later, I came across the Aboriginal practice of Dadirri, often described as deep, inner listening and quiet, still awareness. I remember feeling less as though I had discovered something new and more as though I had finally encountered words that echoed an experience I had carried since childhood. My own path is my own, and I would never presume to speak for a tradition that has held this wisdom for generations. But their description gave me language for something I had struggled to describe for most of my life.

I still find it difficult to explain.

The closest image I've ever found is standing beneath a night sky and slowly realizing that the stars are not scattered at all. As I continue looking, they begin forming relationships with one another until constellations appear where moments before there seemed to be only separate points of light.

That is how deeper listening feels to me.

It isn't about collecting more information.

It isn't about trying to be intuitive or extraordinary.

It is about remaining present long enough for relationships to become visible.

For many years, I kept this part of myself quiet because I knew it wasn't how everyone experienced the world. I worried about being misunderstood, or sounding strange, or trying to describe something that seemed to live just beyond language.

But I have come to realize that hiding it also meant hiding the very place from which my writing, my artwork, my sessions, and my life have always grown.

Deeper listening is not something I learned to do.

It is the way I have met the world for as long as I can remember.

Looking back now, I wonder if that is why one particular dream captured my imagination so completely.

 …

When I was little, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

I don't remember exactly when that dream first took hold, only that it settled into me with surprising certainty. While other children imagined becoming teachers, nurses, or astronauts, I imagined kneeling in the earth with a small brush in my hand, patiently uncovering something that had waited a very long time for someone to notice it.

I don't remember the artifacts as much as I remember the feeling.

There was something deeply comforting about the thought that beautiful things could remain hidden without ever truly being lost. They simply waited beneath the surface until someone arrived with enough patience to uncover them gently.

Looking back now, I can see that I wasn't really fascinated by history.

I was fascinated by discovery.

Life, of course, had other plans for me, or so I believed.

The years carried me through motherhood, loss, healing, creativity, and countless quiet transformations that I could never have imagined as a little girl. Somewhere along the way, I became a writer, an artist, and someone who found herself sitting beside people during tender seasons of their lives. I learned to listen beneath words. I noticed patterns other people overlooked. I became captivated by dreams, symbols, relationships, and those nearly invisible moments that often change us more than the loud ones.

At the time, none of those pieces seemed connected.

They simply felt like the life I happened to be living.

Then, without my trying to create it, another pattern quietly emerged.

Maps began appearing everywhere.

Compass roses found their way into my artwork. Weathered parchment felt strangely familiar beneath my hands. I found myself writing Field Notes, welcoming travelers, creating companions, speaking about orientation instead of fixing, and listening for living threads instead of searching for answers.

For a while, I assumed I had stumbled upon an aesthetic that simply felt like home.

Now I wonder if I had begun uncovering an entire landscape.

The remarkable part wasn't that these ideas appeared.

It was that they already seemed to know one another.

The lantern belonged with the compass.

The compass belonged with the map.

The map belonged with the Field Notes.

The Field Notes belonged with the companions.

The companions belonged with the travelers.

And somehow, without my noticing when it happened, all of them had begun living together inside the same world.

Nothing felt manufactured.

Everything felt remembered.

That realization deepened even further when I experienced my own Illuminated Thread Tracking session.

Until then, I had always been the one holding the brush.

This time I became the traveler.

The session didn't hand me a new identity. Instead, it gathered the scattered pieces of the one I had been quietly becoming for years. It reflected relationships I had somehow been living without fully seeing them. The writer met the artist. The observer met the tracker. The lantern found the compass, and suddenly the landscape that had been growing around me no longer looked like separate ideas.

It looked like home.

...

I just stopped writing.

Not because I lost my train of thought.

Because another thought arrived that I had never considered before.

What if little DeAn'Na already knew something that grown-up DeAn'Na is only now beginning to understand?

When I was little, I thought I wanted to discover a buried city.

But what if I somehow already knew... that I was the buried city?

That thought made me lean back in my chair.

It didn't feel like something I invented.

It felt like something I had just uncovered.

And then another realization quietly followed it.

The writing is the brush.

Every sentence brushes away another handful of sand.

Every story uncovers another room.

Every quiet observation opens another doorway.

Perhaps that's why I always write these moments in italics.

They aren't interruptions.

They're the instant the brush touches stone.

The moment something hidden says, "Here I am."

…

As I sat quietly after writing those words, two old stories wandered into the room almost at the same time.

The first was Lot's wife.

The second was the story of the Salt Doll.

I wasn't looking for either of them.

They simply arrived.

For a moment, I smiled because they seemed like unlikely companions to a buried city. One story carried stone in my memory. The other carried salt dissolving into the sea. I wasn't sure what either of them had to do with archaeology, and I resisted the temptation to decide too quickly.

Over the years, I have learned that deeper listening doesn't ask me to explain everything the moment it appears.

It asks me to stay.

So I wrote their names in the margin of my notebook and returned to the brush.

Perhaps they will speak later.

Or perhaps they already have.

…

When I returned to the page, I found myself smiling at the little girl who had once imagined ancient ruins beneath distant landscapes.

She wasn't wrong.

She simply misunderstood where the excavation would take place.

Today, I don't uncover forgotten civilizations buried beneath the earth.

I uncover living landscapes.

Those landscapes don't reveal themselves because I am looking harder than anyone else. They reveal themselves because I have learned to remain in relationship with them long enough to hear what they have been quietly saying all along. Deeper listening has never been about acquiring hidden knowledge. It has always been an act of patient relationship.

Sometimes they reveal themselves through dreams. Sometimes through conversations. Sometimes through symbols that quietly gather until they begin speaking the same language. Sometimes through a felted companion standing on a tiny shoreline, or a Field Note written after noticing something I almost walked past.

And every once in a while, the landscape I uncover is my own.

That may be why observation has always felt less like a practice and more like a place to live.

It is where my writing begins.

It is where my artwork begins.

It is where my sessions begin.

It is where relationships quietly reveal themselves.

For years, I believed I was searching for the thread that would explain who I was. Instead, I discovered an entire landscape waiting patiently beneath the surface. It is a place where maps are drawn with care, lanterns remain lit, companions wait faithfully, travelers are welcomed, and Field Notes are left behind so that those who arrive later might recognize something of themselves in the journey.

The brush is still moving.

There are still rooms I haven't entered.

There are still pathways hidden beneath the sand.

And perhaps that is the greatest discovery of all.

Little DeAn'Na never stopped becoming the archaeologist she dreamed of being.

She simply learned that the most extraordinary excavation would not lead her into the past.

It would lead her gently, patiently, and beautifully...

home.

…

If something in this Field Note resonated with you, or quietly uncovered something of your own, I would love to hear about it.

Not because there is a right interpretation, but because I have come to believe that our discoveries often illuminate one another.

Thank you for spending a little time beside the brush with me today.

Until next time...

Keep listening.

You never know what may already be waiting beneath the surface.

Recorded by DeAn'Na, Keeper of the Lantern
Writer, artist, and relational illuminator

Every Field Note begins the same way.

I sit down to write what I think I know...

...and leave having uncovered something I didn't know was waiting for me.