This is about the achievement of two women, Ayo and Mead. They live in the village of Woodedge on one of the islands with which Ursula LeGuin has populated her world, EarthSea. Let me describe the achievement first, then I will describe the circumstances.

“They listened to him, not agreeing, not denying, but accepting his despair. His words went into their listening silence, and rested there for days, and came back to him changed.”

This is the kind of graphic description at which LeGuin excels. In this vision, the silence that is maintained by the women has an effect on the words. The words “rest” in this silence and by doing so are changed and when they return to the speaker, they mean something more than they did when he spoke them.

The speaker is a man who, in this part of the story [1] is called Otter. A woman he met under brutal conditions has saved his life and he had been unable to save hers in return. The woman’s use name was Flag. Ayo was her mother and Mead her aunt.

“Whatever I am,” said Otter, “whatever I can do, it’s not enough.” He has the terrible power of the wizards and the corrupt venality of the kings of EarthSea in mind. “Gelluk’s gone,” he says in reference to the wizard he has just killed, “and maybe Losen [one of the corrupt kings] will follow. Will it make any difference?

Mead hears “It’s not enough” and responds, “It’s never enough, and what can anyone do alone.” She has a point and she knows what she is talking about because she is one of the Women of the Hand, a very quiet and tightly woven resistance movement. But Otter can’t hear her. His experience has been so raw and so recent. He is still learning to see how bad things are. He follows his first question, will it make a difference, with three additional questions. Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done?

It is those words and many more like them that go into the listening silence the women create and maintain. They do not express agreement with what he is saying although they do agree. They do not deny his argument although they find it inadequate. Instead, they accept his despair. That is what makes up the listening silence and, I would add, the healing silence as well.

And when the words come back to Otter, they carry with them the sense of Mead’s question, “What can anyone do alone?” And Otter has a wonderful idea. “We can’t do anything without each other,” he said, “But it’s the greedy ones and the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other. And those who won’t join them stand each alone,”
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I really want another round of the conversation. I always want too much. LeGuin knows not to give us the next round. In this other round, Otter would ask how it is possible for “those who won’t join them” to be together and to act together. And Ayo would have given Otter the sign used by the Women of the Hand and he would know that the answer to his question is trust. It was the radical trust Flag offered to him and that he offered to her when they were both slaves that freed them. It is what saved Otter’s life from the wizard and nearly saved Flag’s life. [2]

I was struck by the way the generous healing silence these women offer as a place for the anguished words Otter has. It cannot be easy to accept such despair, not agreeing and not denying, but it is that healing quiet that allowed the words to return to Otter rich with meaning—his own meaning—and ready to go to work.

[1] The story is called “The Finder.” It is the first, and to my mind, the best of the stories in LeGuin’s Tales of EarthSea.
[2] Here is how LeGuin describes the sign. “She held up her first finger; raised the other fingers and clenched them into a fist; then slowly turned her wrist and opened her hand palm out, as if in offering,”