relationships – Necessary Whispers

Poem: We Walked Through Snow and Ice

People are complicated. They’re rarely what we first believe, and they’re almost always carrying a weight we cannot see. We tend to notice what others are willing or able to show us, and we assign meaning from there.

Strength, in particular, is easy to misread. Sometimes it’s resilience. Sometimes it’s concealment. Often it’s both.

We move through the world interpreting one another through our own mixture of experience, education, memory, and fear. It is remarkable that we connect at all. And yet, we do.

We walked along in the snow and ice
And you wanted to hold my hand.
I thought you wanted to show yourself strong,
But you were losing your footing too,
And needed my steadiness to help you along.

I refused you because I did not need your help,
I did not fear a fall,
And then you fell all on your own.
I wondered
If I could have helped.

We walked along a sandy shore
And you wanted to hold an umbrella up to the sun.
I thought you worried my skin would burn,
But yours was turning red,
You forgot your hat and needed the cover.

I refused you because I did not need your help,
My skin is olive in tone,
And then your skin turned hot.
I wondered
If I should have helped.

We walked along in wind and rain
And you wanted to lead me into shelter.
I thought you wanted to hold me close,
But beads of sweat gathered around your head,
And fever took your strength and made you ill.

I refused you because I did not need your help,
For me, the rain is a thrill,
And then you lay for days in your bed.
I wondered
Why I did not help.

We walked along inside my dreams
And you wanted to plot out the way.
I thought you wanted to boast in your sense of direction,
But the path grew long and the day turned to night,
So we lost one another under the stars.

I refused your course because I did not need your help,
For me, wandering without plan is adventure,
But then I lost you and you were gone.
I wondered
If I should have let you lead.

We walked away, I went this way, you went that,
And you did not turn to watch me go.
I thought you wanted to stay,
But the distance grew wide
And the time grew long.

I refused to feel because I could not feel it all,
My heart was broken in your hands,
But when I felt it all at once
I turned,
And you were gone.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Unknowable: An Allegory

“Do you think we are unknowable?” she asked.

Caimon looked down at the dirt around his feet and noticed his shoe was untied. “Not completely, no.”

“Do you mean that we are partly unknowable? But partly knowable, too?”

He could feel his pulse in his temples as he bent down to tie his shoe, “I think we can know someone as much as they are willing to be known.”

She wondered about his answer as she leaned over to tighten the Velcro on the side of her own shoe, “Do you want me to know you?” She whispered the first part of the sentence, but the second part leapt too loudly from her mouth.

“I guess I want everyone to know me. But not really.” He could tell, right away, this wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear.

“Well,” she said, with securely fastened feet, “I think I understand.”

Caimon tried to make a joke, but it fell between his feet, “Maybe you do. But not really.”

As his paltry attempt at humor mixed in with the dirt beneath the hem of his pants, Caimon wanted her to walk away. He didn’t like the weight of her stare, and he didn’t want to feel responsible for her anymore. In a moment of desperation, Caimon turned from her—filled with the conviction that he would never look in her direction again—and he said, “Why do you always need to know? What is wrong with not knowing?”

His footsteps were slow and heavy as he could feel her blue eyes fastened to his back with long, thick ropes tied around his organs. Her eyes pulled at him and tried to stop his movement until, between one exhale and the next breath in, he felt her release. The moment of her imprisonment was the moment of his freedom, and in his freedom, he began to run. Not fast and with nowhere to go, but with the swiftness of a man whose shoes were tied and whose longest mistake grew shorter behind him.

Caimon ran with his secrets. The unknowable parts of himself were rattling around between his right ear and his left. They were sloshing back and forth between his rib cages and percolating up into his throat. The words he would never say, the feelings he could never explain, and the courage he conjured in his dreams but left stuck to the sides of his imagination were loosening with each new footstep. He wondered whether it was dangerous to allow the movement. His secrets felt like gumballs in a gumball machine and he had only ever seen one fall at a time: what would happen if the whole lot was disturbed at once?

He laughed under his breath and panted fog into the cold night air, “If only I had a quarter, I could find some courage to chew on.”

He laughed again, but this time he knew it wasn’t funny.

The words of the girl wrote themselves on the trees surrounding him, and he could hear them on the wings of the wind that fell through the leaves. He watched his shoes as they hit the ground—left, right, left, right—and he began to count the steps. Each step was further away and, somehow, closer, too. Further from her: closer to something new.

It wasn’t any one aspect of the girl Caimon needed to flee, but the anchor her whole had become. She needed Caimon, and Caimon didn’t want to be needed. She expected things from him, and he wasn’t sure he had what she was waiting to discover. He didn’t want to disappoint her, to lose her, or find her, and the girl only wanted to be found. Theirs was a connection of two negative magnets, one wanting to change her charge. She wanted to change the nature of herself so she could be pulled into Caimon and he into her, almost as though the choice no longer belonged to them.

“Unknowable,” he read as the words wrote themselves in the reflection of a lake up ahead. Caimon stopped running and never looked back, but sat on the edge of the water.

The air was so cold by then that his breath felt like crystals grabbing the edges of his lips as it was blown from his body. The forest was silent and still: the kind of stillness that lowers itself like a parachute over nature when the moon is moments away from switching places with the sun.

Caimon, tired and cold, reached into the pocket of his coat to find his book of matches. Once he was certain the matches were there, he looked near his feet for pieces of fallen wood. One by one, Caimon reached into the dirt for the wood, methodically like he was looking for pieces of a puzzle that had fallen to the floor. Once he had gathered enough wood to build a fire, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two things: the matches he knew were there and an envelope she had given him earlier, long before he tied his shoe.

Caimon crumpled the envelope—still filled with her letter—in his left hand and placed it on top of the wood. With a match in his right hand, Caimon struck the side of the matchbook and watched the flame immediately appear.

“Quickly,” Caimon thought. “It is quickly that a match is filled with fire.” Just as the flame crept dangerously close toward his fingers, Caimon leaned over and watched as the flame stretched itself from the match to the letter, like a bridge between two lovers. Or two strangers. Once the letter was lit, Caimon stood.

He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the letter begin to grow as it linked arms with the pieces of wood he had gathered from the forest floor. Soon, the fire began to melt the breath that gently rolled from between Caimon’s lips. He lightly bent his fingers into fists, his fingertips touching the inside of his own palm. He felt the skin on his hands and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before how rough that skin had become.

He could see on the inside of his eyelids the orange and red of the fire he had built: the fire made with his rough hands and matches and her letter. He didn’t want to look at it just yet but, instead, he wanted to feel it dance before him like a lover unencumbered by self-consciousness or pride. Caimon drank in the light and let the colors of the illumination paint a masterpiece inside his mind.

Enraptured by the freedom of the flames and the heat of the fire against his shoes and legs and face, Caimon leaned back his head and sighed a message that flew into the sky, “There is nothing wrong with not knowing.”

And without seeing the sun begin to rise, Caimon knew the day was new.

This story was inspired by German painter Heiko Müller’s piece, The Inner Light http://www.heikomueller.de

Poem: The Thousand Deaths of Canton

Canton died on Monday

And then again on Friday

And in between

A thousand other deaths

All in a row—

His breathing shallow,

His passion stretched wide

Like a well dug for water supply

Now a brimming

Hole.


Canton’s misery has a name—

A she as you may have guessed

With brownish hair and

Bluish eyes

Anchored to her soul,

Her voice sounds

Like frogs chanting

In the night,

A melody Canton

Extols.


Her name is Sienna

Like the color artist’s mix

When simple red

Promises nothing of

Complexity

In its parts—

But complexity

Is the only way

To convey the

Whole.


She walked into his life—

No, she swam instead

Like a pirate

Fallen out of a ship

Whose pockets were filled,

Whose lungs nearing empty

Needed Canton’s

Breath to make it

To the shore with no

Patrol.


Canton wrapped his arms

Around her belted waist

He pulled her body

Wet with salted

Memories

To a warm and sunny

Place where

Resuscitating Sienna

Became his starring

Role.


He breathed his life

Into her lungs,

Sienna’s breast inflated

Like a blowfish

Reacting to her fear

Desperately wanting

His protection—

No, that’s not right—

His affection wrapped up in his

Soul.


Canton died when Sienna

Slept—

The world collapsed

With her unconsciousness

As though slumber

Was a distance too far to

Bare,

Not even the moon

Could console his emptied

Control.


He died when she blinked,

He could not withstand the dark

Her eyelids commanded—

Like a conductor

Setting the rhythm of

His pain and

One and two and three and

Four—

The music behind her open eyes, Canton’s

Parole.


Canton and Sienna

Clasped their fingers together

Like two pirates searching for love

Crossing a windy expanse—

They cried and laughed

And died and lived

Along the way

Two shipwrecked halves navigating

Toward one mysterious

Shoal.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

The Garden Between Us: On the Moral Work of Communication

By Jill Szoo Wilson

No Kings protests. Israel and Palestine peace talks. The Mayoral debate in New York City. And somewhere between those headlines, a viral argument about whether pumpkin spice season begins too early.

What a week!

During a class discussion on the topic of ethical communication, one of my students made an observation that stayed with me:

“Sometimes I walk away from a conversation with one of my friends or family members, and I think they really understood what I was saying. Then, like a week later, I’ll see something they post on social media and realize — whoa — we weren’t even in the same universe. How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?”

There was real frustration in her voice as she grappled intellectually and emotionally with how to translate effective communication skills from the classroom to real-world relationships and conversations that truly matter to her.

Her question strikes at the heart of communication theory itself. Every major model—from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s early work in information theory to the later transactional and constructivist frameworks—grapples with the same problem she voiced: how does meaning move from one mind to another without distortion? Communication is never just about speaking clearly; it’s about whether understanding travels intact from one mind to another. The first modern attempt to diagram that process came in 1948, when two Bell Labs researchers sought to solve a practical problem—how to transmit information efficiently over telephone lines—and ended up shaping a foundation for how we consider human connection today.

Section I: The Shannon–Weaver Model — Communication as Transmission

When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver introduced their model of communication in 1948, they weren’t thinking about classrooms or conversations; they were thinking about telephones. Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Labs, was studying how to send messages through electrical circuits with the least amount of interference. His goal was precision: a system in which information could be transmitted, received, and decoded without distortion.

In its simplest form, the Shannon–Weaver Model outlines five key components: a sender, a message, a channel, noise, and a receiver. Later versions added feedback to acknowledge that communication rarely ends at reception; it loops back through response. The model’s simplicity made it foundational for how we understand all forms of message exchange, from radio broadcasts to human dialogue.

Imagine you’re explaining something important to a friend. You form the thought (sender), put it into words (message), speak aloud (channel), and hope it reaches the listener (receiver). Noise—anything from background chatter to the friend’s assumptions or daydreams—can distort what you mean. Feedback, whether a nod or a question, helps you gauge whether your message landed.

Now imagine trying to apologize to someone you care about after a painful misunderstanding. You’ve rehearsed the conversation for days, turning phrases over in your mind, searching for the language that might soften what was said. When the moment finally comes, you speak from the heart, but your voice trembles. You mean to say “I’m sorry,” yet what they hear is “I’m still defending myself.” You reach out, and somehow they retreat. The words are correct, but the meaning collapses somewhere between intent and reception.

The Shannon–Weaver Model helps us see the anatomy of that collapse. The “noise” isn’t external static or interference, but the invisible internal weight of emotion, memory, and assumption. Even when a message is spoken clearly, those unseen forces can bend it out of shape. The model reminds us that successful communication isn’t about flawless delivery but about whether understanding survives the distance between two people.

The model is practical but limited: it shows how messages move, not how meaning emerges. Shannon and Weaver understood communication as a linear transfer of data; humans experience it as something far more collaborative — a process of interpretation, empathy, and response.

This distinction is important because even a perfectly transmitted message can still fail to communicate meaning. As my student asked, “How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying?” According to Shannon and Weaver, you’d simply confirm that the message was received and decoded. But real understanding, as anyone who has been misunderstood knows, is not that simple. It requires shared context, empathy, and attention to nuance. These are elements that don’t fit neatly into a circuit diagram.

The Shannon–Weaver Model gives us a starting point: communication as transmission. Yet it leaves us asking what happens beyond transmission, where ideas meet perception. To explore that terrain, we turn to one of the most enduring frameworks in contemporary communication: Barnlund’s Transactional Model.

Section II: Barnlund’s Transactional Model — Communication as Co-Creation

By the 1970s, communication theorist Dean Barnlund proposed a shift so profound that it still reshapes how we teach the subject today. Where Shannon and Weaver treated communication as a line of transmission, Barnlund imagined something circular, alive, and reciprocal. He argued that the exchange itself was not an assembly line of words moving from one mind to another but a living process that creates a shared narrative between people.

Barnlund’s Transactional Model reimagined this process not as a one-way transfer of information but as a dynamic act of co-creation. Every conversation, he suggested, is an event that exists only in the moment it happens, built, revised, and reshaped by both participants at once. The act of meaning-making is mutual. Each person’s interpretation alters the message itself. In this way, communication becomes less about accuracy and more about emergence.

To help students see what this looks like, I often begin with an exercise that never fails to surprise them. I pair students and ask them to tell a simple story from their weekend. The first partner speaks for thirty seconds while the other listens silently, offering no reaction or feedback. Then they switch. When we debrief, most describe the silence as unsettling, even cold. “I felt like I was boring him or maybe he wasn’t even listening,” one student said. The second round changes everything. This time, listeners can nod, smile, or ask questions. The conversation immediately warms. Laughter enters the room. Meaning deepens. What changed wasn’t the content of the stories but the shared construction of them. Each speaker began shaping their language in response to the listener’s cues. Together, they built a small, co-authored moment of understanding.

If Shannon and Weaver gave us the map of communication, Barnlund taught us how to read the terrain. His model asks us to notice the pauses, gestures, silences, and emotional undercurrents that live beneath language. Meaning, he argued, is not simply sent; it is negotiated, felt, and co-authored.

Where Shannon and Weaver saw a sender and receiver, Barnlund saw communicators engaged in simultaneous exchange. Each person is both sender and receiver at once, continually encoding, decoding, and interpreting within a shared field of experience. Communication, in this view, is about negotiating reality together.

Section III: From Transmission to Transformation — Understanding the Difference

The Shannon-Weaver model teaches how to speak clearly, while Barnlund’s model teaches why clarity is sometimes not enough. One focuses on information; the other on interpretation. One aims for precision; the other for understanding.

Learning Shannon-Weaver fosters autonomy. It helps us become aware of purpose, audience, and structure. Learning Barnlund brings humility. It reminds us that even the most carefully crafted message depends on another person’s frame of meaning. There is comfort in realizing this: sometimes we can speak with care and still not be understood. Our responsibility is to communicate as clearly and honestly as we can, and then to accept the outcome rather than trying to control it. There is strength in understanding that we do not have to be fully understood to be worthy of speaking.

A simple exercise illustrates the difference. Imagine describing an image while someone, turned away, tries to draw it based only on your words. The first attempt, with no questions allowed, is pure Shannon-Weaver transmission. The drawing will likely be efficient but distorted. Now imagine trying again with questions and clarifications. The process slows, but understanding grows. Meaning, like art, becomes clearer when it is co-created.

Think of the miscommunication between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. For most of the novel, each interprets the other through the noise of pride, prejudice, and social expectation. Darcy’s words are technically clear—his first proposal is grammatical perfection—but his tone, timing, and failure to consider Elizabeth’s perspective distort the message beyond recognition. It takes a long series of feedback loops—letters, revelations, and changed behavior—for meaning to realign with intent. Only when both listen with humility rather than defensiveness does understanding emerge. Austen’s scene endures because it dramatizes the very truth Barnlund uncovered: communication becomes transformative only when both parties risk vulnerability and mutual perception.

The shift from transmission to creation mirrors a moral one. To communicate ethically is to recognize that every exchange plants something between people: a seed that can grow into trust or misunderstanding, grace or distance. The philosopher Martin Buber, writing in 1923 in I and Thou, taught that real life unfolds through genuine encounter. “All real living is meeting,” he wrote, describing how we come fully alive when we engage another person not as an object to persuade but as a presence to meet. Every tone of voice and every moment of attention becomes soil for what will take root between us. Our words are seeds, and the spaces we tend together become the garden we live in.

That realization gives us a kind of power that is both humbling and hopeful. It means that everyday choices in conversation — things like listening fully, asking questions, or pausing before reacting — can repair trust where there was once distance. Communication becomes not just a skill but a responsibility: the way we decide, moment by moment, what kind of relationships and communities we will build.

My student’s question still lingers: How do you know if someone actually gets what you’re saying? Understanding grows each time we listen with patience and speak with care. It lives in the meeting itself, in the ongoing work of tending meaning between people. When we stay present to one another, communication becomes the living art of truly meeting another human being.

For more essays by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack, click here!