If you have spent much time in a Salvation Army store, you may have heard a peculiar sound.
I heard it one afternoon when I accompanied my wife, Robin, to the Salvation Army Depot in Hornell. As Robin eagerly examined the dresses and blouses, hoping to find something from J. Jill or Eileen Fisher, I cast a desultory look at the polo shirts and tee-shirts, the vests and forlorn tweeds. Finding little to whet my appetite, I turned my attention to the sounds in the store.
What I heard was a low, continuous scraping. Was it a knife being sharpened? A blade removing paint? The sound was metallic, arhythmic, and vaguely abrasive, but it held my attention, in a way that the polo shirts had not. What was I hearing? Was it someone pushing a rusty cart down the aisle?
A few moments later, the answer dawned on me. What I was hearing was the sound of metal hangers—as many as a dozen—being pushed along metal rods, as the shoppers looked for bargains. From time to time the sound would diminish, as someone found a promising item. Then it would pick up again. The more I listened, the more varied and pleasing the sound became. Although it had probably always been there, I had never noticed it before.
Quite possibly I was listening because I had nothing better to do. But to listen to what is occurring, within and without, is an important aspect of Zen training. And to listen without immediately knowing—or trying to know—what one is hearing is itself an instructive practice.
It is natural, of course, to want to name what we hear. Unidentified sounds, particularly loud or sudden sounds, can be disconcerting, as Alfred Hitchcock well understood. When something goes bump in the night, it unnerves us, at least until we discern that it was not an intruder but the snow shovel falling and hitting the deck. Having solved that mystery, we can go back to sleep.
In Zen practice, however, the point is to be awake: to be aware of whatever is going on, moment by moment, and to be intimate with our experience. Our accumulated knowledge, however valuable, can stand in the way of that objective, as can our habits of defining, naming, and comparing. To have a concept of a sound is one thing, to have an experience of that sound another. The concept may give us comfort, but the experience returns us to the reality of our lives.
Waking at six in the morning, we hear the song of a bird. Is it a house wren? A Carolina wren? Some kind of warbler?
Listening again, we drop the effort to know what we are hearing—or to show off our knowledge to ourselves. We enjoy a moment of wonder and pure listening. In the language of Zen, we savor the “suchness” of the song, its transitory presence in the stream of time.
Such moments are central to Zen practice, not least because they open us to a spacious, immovable awareness, within which we can observe both our immediate experience and our lifelong conditioning: our urge to label whatever we encounter. Such moments are fostered by quiet sitting, but they can occur at any time and any place, be it a darkened zendo or the well-lit aisles of the Salvation Army.
One Time, One Meeting 
That’s very curious. I recently attended my first 3-day sesshin, with the possibility of dokusan with a teacher. The teacher’s signal to dokusan was a bell, which I heard repeatedly during the sesshin, and it struck me that it sounded exactly like someone running their hand through a collection of metal hangers.